AID FOR BRITAIN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 December 1940, Page 5

AID FOR BRITAIN

SUPPORTED BY MR HENRY FORD HOPE OF ENDING WAR IN A HURRY. DETAILS OF THE ECCLES PROPOSAL. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK. December 4. In Detroit today Mr Henry Ford said that if Britain needs money he favoured giving them all they want. “It will end the war in a hurry,” he said. “We did it before, and we might as well do it again.” The financier and banker, Mr Mariner Stoddard Eccles, released a “full and correct” text of the speech which he made yesterday on financial aid to Britain at a meeting of bankers, industrialists, and economists. He denied that he proposed a 2,500,000,000dollar loan to Britain and said the facts had been distorted. The text stated: “I believe that Congress, in considering all the interrelated elements of the monetary picture, should consider whether or not it would be wise to make credits available at low rates as a means of aiding the British, taking as collateral their gold and also their security holdings here and in Canada and elsewhere.” Mr Eccles outlined his scheme at a meeting in camera of the National Industrial Conference Board. He declared that it was to be expected that the Empire's gold would flow to the United States, where it would be bought by the Treasury, thus swelling the bank reserves and increasing the danger of inflation. On the other hand, the funds of the proposed loan could be raised by the sale of securities and the gold would be earmarked as a backing instead of passing to the reserve. Mr Eccles’s views, which were widely circulated by members of the conference, have aroused interest due to the controversy over granting Britain credits and also because it is Mr Eccles’s first departure from the “easy money” policy. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator George, urged that war material factories should be placed on a 24 hours working basis and the arms production programme stepped up to a war time pace because material aid to Britain must be given quickly if it was to be most effective.