TENDENCY TO RETURN TO PRE-WAR VALUES.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 63, 16 March 1931, Page 7

TENDENCY TO RETURN TO PRE-WAR VALUES.

UNDERLYING LAW OF ECONOMIC GRAVITY.

“ While I was at Home I formed one very definite opinion and that was that, apart from the multitude of tendencies that were moving affairs here, there and everywhere, there was one underlying tendency that worked more steadily and certainly than any other—a tendency for values generally to settle down to somewhere near pre-war levels,” declared Mr H. S. E. Turner, in his address at the quarterly luncheon of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce to-day.

“On consideration,” he added, “it seemed that this was not very surprising, because pre-war values were, in a sense, the result of seventy or eighty years of the action and reaction of world-wide economic forces. The fact that certain after-war factors tended to modify the result did not, it seemed to me, alter the main fact that values were settling down in accordance with some underlying law of economic gravity to levels below those to which we have been accustomed during the past ten years, and nearer to general prewar levels.”