WORLD FINANCE

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVI, Issue 22934, 3 July 1944, Page 6

WORLD FINANCE

Experts Gather In America (7.30 p.m.) NEW YORK, June 30. United Nations' experts on money and credit and banking will assemble at Bretton Wocds, New Hampshire, to-morrow for a conference on postwar international monetary co-opera-tion. Proposals will be presented for an international bank and post-war monetary stabilisation, but all agreements reached must be referred to the Governments concerned. The 'principal problems are: (1) Promoting international monetary co-operation through permanent institutions. (2) Expansion of international trade to maintain a high level of world employment. (3) The creation of a world fund of gold and currency on which member nations may draw to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments. (4) The promotion' of exchange stability to avoid competitive exchange depreciation. (5) The establishment of multilateral payments facilities, and the elimination of foreign exchange restrictions. (6) Shortening periods of disequilibrium in the international balance of payments. The “Wall Street Journal” says that interest chiefly centres on the rival plans submitted by the British and American experts, which are identical in aims, but are widely different in method. Lord Keynes, head of the British delegation, appears to have discovered a way to operate an international fund without gold. On the contrary, the United States is most anxious to preserve the gold standard, and apparently is willing to disburse many millions of dollars to operate the fund. “Commerce is the lifeblood of a free society, and we must see that the arteries are not clogged again by artificial barriers created through senseless economic rivalries,’’ said President Roosevelt in a message to the opening of the United Nations’ monetary conference/' Economic diseases are highly communicable, and it follows, therefore, that the economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbours. Only through a dynamic, soundly expanding world economy can the living standards of individual nations be advanced to levels permitting the full realisation of our hopes for the future.” Mr Henry Morgenthau, Secretary to the U.S. Treasury, accepting the presidency of the conference, said that economic aggression could have no other offspring than war. He hoped the conference would keep before it the two elementary axioms: (1) Prosperity has no fixed, limits. The more other nations enjoy, the more each nation will have for itself. (2) Prosperity, like peace, is indivisible.