OUR “BENEFICENT” BLOCKADE.

Taihape Daily Times, 24 December 1917, Page 6

OUR “BENEFICENT” BLOCKADE.

Herr von Gwintei-, the head of the Deutsche Bank, has just produced an essay on “The Inexhaustible Wealth of Germany” as his contribution to the War Loan campaign His chief idea is that the British blockade, by compelling Germany to spend her money at home, has been a beneficent thing, a blessing in disguise. Germany otherwise, Gwinuer puts it, would Long ago have spent her economic strength. It had been particularly fortunate that she had not been able to import “luxuries” during the past three years. The war had taught Germany not only to work but to save. On her beer and spirits alone, taking peace prices as a basis of reckoning, Germans were saving more than £650,000,000 a year. War’s iron necessities were also responsible for enormous savings on clothes, light, heat, food, and commodities in which the country in pre-war days over-in-dulged. Germany was new living on the great supplies which the Empire, grown rich during forty-three years of peace, had accumulated. These supplies were still sufficient “for years.” Such articles as were no longer obtainable in adequate quantity, Germans had either learned to do without or had invented substitutes for, sucb as nitrogen for production of explosives and fertilisers. In consequence of the slow consumption of her great reserves of supplies such gigantic amounts of 'capital bad flowed into the banks that the demand for good interest-bearing investments was constantly rising. Banks and savings ■ banks had twice as many depositors to-day as before the war, and their aggregate deposits, notwithstanding the millions invested in war loans, were much higher than in 1914.