A FLOW OF WEALTH.

Wairarapa Age, 22 February 1924, Page 4

A FLOW OF WEALTH.

Messrs Dalgety and Co. have calculated that during the four months of the wool sales in New Zealand something more than £10,000,000 has been, or is being distributed amongst the woolgrowcrs of the Dominion. The wool sold by that firm in the North Island during the season has averaged £23 10s to £24 10s per bale, and in the South Island rather more, and the sales have amounted to 439,000 bales. By far the greater part of this huge sum is money brought into New Zealand from outside; only a small proportion of our yearly clip is absorbed by the local mills. This liberation in 100 days of ten million pounds paid for the farmer.-’ annual produce naturally causes a great disturbance in the financial world. It is a vast sum of money to change hands in so short a time, and it must inevitably have an unsettling effect. A large portion of it, as we know, will be merely a Leaking clearance to balance debits for accommodation in the way'of overdrafts that have been incurred in the last year or two. A considerable portion even in normal times would go to the settlement of accounts for supplies received during the year. More of it Svill go in taxes, which are made payable in the farmers’ harvest season. Still more will go in the purchase of store stock with a view to next year’s wool and meat harvest. Over and above all these, we hope, the average woolgrower will have something substantial for himself. The dairyfarmer, meanwhile, has been receiving his income in smaller moieties from month to month during nine or ten months of the year. The butterfat income of New Zealand is considerably in excess of that from wool, but it is received in smaller amounts and it friekles through more minute channels over a longer period of the year. The two together keep many of the wheels of life moving. *