WHAT TRADE FIGURES SHOW

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 124, 22 November 1932, Page 6

WHAT TRADE FIGURES SHOW

Examination of the external trade returns for the ten months ended 31st October provides no argument in favour of increasing the exchange rate New Zealand on London. Exports amount to £31,000,000 and imports to £19*000,000—in New Zealand currency, •a ' balance to the credit of the Dominion of £12,000,000. On those returns the existing rale of exchange of 10 per cent, ought to be reduced rather than' increased. It would be reduced if economic laws were allowed free play. Prices for wool, meat, or dairy produce are admitted})/ very, low and some producers may regard them as ruinous—all depending upon individual • costs of production, and provision made in fat years in the form of savings or reserves for the lean,years that have come. Costs of production have already been cut down, interest has been, reduced, and the beneficent rains .of special legislation have fallen upon the financially just and unjust alike. The Government, banks, and pastoral companies have strained their resources to the utmost to help the primary producer, and continue to do so; but cannot ensure for them prices in the world's markets comparable 'to those received in the socalled good times.

Nevertheless prices for some products tend to improved-meat, for instance —arid the omens as to the value of wool are not unfavourable, as may be seen when prices at the London wool sales, opening to-day, are received. The market for butter is depressed, as is only to be expected, for, figuratively speaking, the United Kingdom has been deluged with /butter. Weddel and Co.'s returns show that: for the twelve months ended 30th June this year 394,500 r tons was imported by the United Kingdom, compared with 294,000 tons-in 1929 and ••224,000 tons in 1924. Butter has definitely displaced margarine in households where it had been regarded as a costly luxury with corresponding reduction in price. 'No Government can entertain any plan, by juggling with exchange or by subsidising producers, that will enable' producers to go ■on producing regardless,of the inexorable law of; supply and demand. All this, of course, is trite and text-book knowledge, and yet it is astonishing to mark how general is the haziness of many unthinking people regarding the simplest rudiments of economics.