Lausanne---A Happy Ending

Te Puke Times, 16 September 1932, Page 3

Lausanne---A Happy Ending

A Gaustic Comment

The National Govern mentis on the top of its form. Last week the dead weight of a 5 per cent upon the money world was removed .almost by a stroke of the pen. This week Reparations are finally abolished. Thus two big steps along the road to recovery have been recorded, and two of the most difficult which faced the new Government. The Reparations! story is simple and interesting if stripped of all its details and 'told in brief outline. Thirteen years ago, having passed through the long course of inten siVe war propaganda and reaohed the mentality represented by hauging the Kaiser and squeezing the lemon until the pips squeaked we made the Treaty of Versailles. The late Sir Sidney Low holds the reoord for a calculation that Germany could pay £250,000,000, 000. That mentality has through thirteen years of suffering and disaster gradually disappeared. In the meantime thirty-fiVe conferences and Committees of experts have met and the Reparation figure comes down to a nominal £200,000,000. The politicians, therefore, through thirty-five conferences have undone their own folly at the rate of £7,000,000,000 a ,oonferenCe. As to the £200,000,000 now left on the account the admiration of the business world will be extended to the wonderful political camouflage employed in this final act of statesmanship. The £200,000,000 is not called Reparations, but compensation for giving up the Reparation idea. It is not to be paid to the victors, but to the Bank of International Settlements for the purpose of European reconstruction. The Bank is not to collect the money for three years and then only if it can be done without affecting the German exchanges. Interest is only to be paid when a collection, that will never be made, has been reported, and if these unlikely transactions are not completed in fifteen years the whole scheme is wiped out. It would undoubtedly be quite impossible to find any money market in the world that would give to day 10 per cent of the nominal value of these Lausanne bonds and the Reparations is in this way reduoed to something less than a few weeks’ cost of our own dole. Altogether a pretty story with a happy ending, pointing a moral which may in time be noticed and learnt, that politics and money, like oil and water, do not mix welli—Hardware Trade Journal.