SYNTHETIC GOLD.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 March 1922, Page 2

SYNTHETIC GOLD.

WHAT IT WOULD MEAN IF IT CAME.

Some weekg ago a mild sensation whs caused by assertion by Professor Irving Fisher, an American economist, that he believed a German chemist ’had found a wa} to make synthetic gold out of the baser metals, at a fraction of the cost of - gold. Professor Fisher admitted, that he was not a metallurgist, and could only go on what he was told as to the possibility of the operation; and the story has since been substantially denied. As an economist, owever, Professor Fisher’s comments n the event are of interest, and in the nurse of the lecture in which he made Hie statement he described what would ; happen if the event really happened. The effect would, be, he said, to cause another price revolution similar to those the world experienced in the past. In the sixteenth century we had one after the outpourings of the precious metals from the New World into Spain. After the gold discoveries in 1-849 in California and Australia, there was another price revolution during the ensuing quarter of a century: When the cyanide process developed in the ’nineties, and there were discoveries of gold in South Africa, Cripple Creek, and Alaska, there was another'great increase in prices. The Great War had added to these prices by war-inflation of various kinds. “But this discovery, if true, would produce a much more rapid inflation, it it were allowed to go full tilt ahead,” explained Professor Fisher, “and we should have the value of the pound sinking in rts actual purchasing power to perhaps what the franc is now in the course of five or ten years. Probably, if the matter becomes actually a menace, the world would find a way to escape these evils, because it would disrupt all our contracts, create a loss to every creditor and bond-holder, savings-bank depositor, salaried man and wage-earner, and everyone in the position of receiving money. It would eave Germany most of the effort of paying the reparations, and give her a source of revenue. Probably the disastrous effects on standard would be avoided Either by the Governments of the world taking over this process and regulating the output of gold, or by giving up the gold, standard altogether, and substituting sortie of*her.”