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Hokitika Guardian, 29 September 1933, Page 4

Tiik main financial question in Japan now is whether the heavy borrowing of the coming year can bo met without dangerout inflation, writes the Tokio correspondent of the Times. The Finance Minister, the Governor of the Bank of Japan, and other financiers •are hopeful that these coming issues can he absorbed without forcing money rates up bv many points and without serous inflation. At the end of 1932 Japan's national debt amounted to 7,003,000,000 yen. At the end of the financial year, 1.92b-2(5, the national debt amounted to just under 3.000,000,000 yen ; it promises to double itself in a decade. It must bo added that there has been a surplus of revenue over expenditure in every year between 1011 and 1920. Some justi-

fixation therefore exists for believing with Mr Takalmslii that when normal trade returns .and when the heavy military expenditure of this year and next are ever, the nation’s revenue will be adequate to its needs. The national debt nor head of population, taking Japan only into account is .approximately 106 yen (£lO 12s at par). That of the United Kingdom is about £l5O a bead, and that of Italy, a country which shares Japanese poverty of national resources, £23 a head. The picture which those figures present Is a mixed one, but it does not justify the predictions of economic collapse which have been heard. The currency devaluation has been drastic, but it has not got out of control. Internal costs are rising only slowly, and the immense competitive .advantages gained by going off gold have more than counter-balanced the increased cost of raw material and of the foreign debt. The depression has temporarily destroyed Japanese financial equilibrium, but the country is in the same boat as the rest of the world in that respect. If trade revives’elsewhere it will revive here. The frets that Japan was the only country to raise her productions indices in 1932 and that she expanded her export trade by 25 per cent in that, year of gloom are gooff evidence of her power to survive.