Storm Precautions

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 262, 30 June 1944, Page 3

Storm Precautions

"S1HE purpose of the International Monetary Conference, so far as these mysteries can be understood by men and women who have never had much money to play with, is to protect the world after the war from economic hurricanes. So the purpose of the pamphlet, International Monetary Fund, which the Government distributed to the booksellers last week, is to help ordinary men and women to understand and influence the decisions that will be made. So far nothing has been decided but the broad principles of approach, Experts have been at work for a couple of years or more clearing away the undergrowth and the thorns. They have not yet removed all the possibilities of conflict, but they have advanced to the point at which they can say, "Here are our broad aims and plans." Some of the principles they lay down, and the reasons by which they support them, are still obscure to non-technical minds, but the basic suggestion so far as New Zealand is concerned is the creation of an international fund to protect individual nations against. post war stresses and strains. It is not so much a question of insulation as of cushioning -giving nations time to adjust themselves to world disturbances "without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity." When a farmer or a business main runs into rough weather he asks his bank to keep him going till the storm passes; and the bank does so, in its own interest as well as in his, if the security seems reasonable. It is now proposed that nations will be kept going in the same way, but of course "under adequate safeguards"; and one of the tasks of the Conference will be to arrange these safeguards, and agree about them. In the meantime the task of the New Zealand public is to understand what is going on-to grasp why the Conference has been called and what its decisions may mean in our own Dominion.