CHANGE NEEDED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 March 1939, Page 5

CHANGE NEEDED

f IN THE MONEY SYSTEM PRIME MINISTER’S OPINION. COMMENTS ON BANKING PRACTICE. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON. This Day. "I am not going to apologise to the Reserve Bank or to anyone else for my belief that the money system should ba changed in order to make it fully express increased production, said the Prime Minister, Mr Savage, in an interview yesterday. “Unless we get increased production, and have it reach the people responsible for, what is the use of it all? The money system that we know has never done that." Mr Savage said he did not -see that any revolution was • necessary—only the application of common sense. “I do not blame the Reserve Bank any more than I blame any other institution,” said Mr Savage. “When I am talking about banking I am talking about the banking system, not just one small’part of it. I still think there is room for a scientist, not only, in the factory, but in the financial institutions that play so important a part in the distribution of those goods when they have been produced.” Mr Savage said there were certain people in banking institutions and elsewhere who thought that the money system wassail right, and that there was no need for any change. “We are living in a changing age, and that should be applied not only to the manufacture of things and the production'of other services, but to the instrument of exchange—the system of exchange,” he said. Unless it were made to apply to it we would go on with glutted markets, and all the time living in fear of war because we had not had the intelligence to distribute equitably as well as produce. Mr Savage said that in his addresses in factories this week he had made it clear that he was not asking people to produce more without a guarantee that they were going to receive more of that production. That applied to employers as well as to employees..

Unless an expanded income were guaranteed for expanded production, it was not reasonable to expect expansion of production to take place. “If there is any clogging of the machine,” added the Prime Minister, “we will have to remove the obstruction wherever it is.”

He said that he had met with the utmost enthusiasm in the factories he had visited. “The employers seem well satisfied with the position,” he said, “and the employees are delighted to see that the Government is taking an intelligent interest in the development of the secondary industries.”