MONEY PROBLEMS

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3263, 21 February 1931, Page 8

MONEY PROBLEMS

i PROFESSOR FISHER'S PLAN, j INVESTIGATION URGED. A resolution urging that the Government should make an investigation of the money stabilisation plan of Professor Irving Fisher, as recommended by the New Zealand Board of Trade in its annual report in 1919, was adopted by the Nelson provincial executive of the Farmers' Union following an address by Mr A. N. Field, of Okiwi Bay, Croixelles. -». Mr Field quoted, from the report of the Board of Trade showing how, in the inflation period in 1919, all sorts of remedies were put forward, but no attention was paid to the money end, the real seat of the trouble. The Board had urged Professor Fisher's plan for stabilising money, :which should be thoroughly gone into. The need was just as great to-day. Mir Field read a passage from a letter he had received from Professor Fisher in which he expressed the view that it would be quite feasible for New Zealand to put his stabilisation scheme into operation without reference to other countries, but that it would be better to get the whole Empire in at once. Undoubtedly it would be better, said Mr Field, but the best way to get the rest in was to have a try here. From a prominent director of the Bank of England Mr Field had also receive'd a letter in which it was stated that, while London was against doing anything but fumble about looking for gold to recover some inherent stability, there was a possibility that objections might be waived, in face of the emergency, to our trying out Professor Fisher's plan. If ever there was an emergency, said Mr Field, New Zealand surely had it with the the Hawke's Bay disaster on top of the slump. The executive decided unanimously to support the request for an examination of Professor Fisher's plan, and also to request the National Economic Committee, about to sit in Wellington, to hear Mr Field. [Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale University, the well-known American authority on monetary problems, advocates the management of currency upon a price-index basis, and his theories haye received considerable attention from those interested in the preservation of a stable money value.]