FRENCH NEW DEAL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1938, Page 9

FRENCH NEW DEAL

SOME BIG PROFITS MADE. Nobody in Paris has been made very happy by the new devaluation of the franc —the third in less than two years —except the lucky owners of the four milliard francs which flowed back to Paris on the day the new devaluation was announced, and of the 60 or 70 milliards which are still abroad, writes the Paris correspondent of the "Sunday Times.” A nice little profit! They may have bought their pound at 75 francs, and are selling them now at 179. No investment in France could have yielded so fat a dividend; small wonder that Frenchmen with a little money (or a lot of money) should have sent it to London rather than build houses or invest it in new factories and be bothered with strikes and other unpleasantness. But it is hard lines on the retired official living on a meagre pension, or on the widow whose interest coupon buys fewer and fewer kilos of bread, and on all those people whose wages, for one reason or another, do not catch up with the increasing cost of living. The little man, with no pound notes hidden under his mattress, and the peasant, with his woollen stocking full of Government bonds, feel that it is all very unfair. In fact, the chief beneficiary of the Front Populaire, as somebody cynically but not untruthfully remarked, has been the speculator.