Borrowing and business in Australia

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 183051623X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-222122

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Wood, Gordon L. http://d-nb.info/gnd/1239193688

Title:: Borrowing and business in Australia

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Oxford university press, H. Milford

Year of publication:: 1930

Scope:: xv, 267 Seiten; graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part V. Australia during and after the great war

Collection:: Economics Books

IN RELATION TO PUBLIC BORROWING 175 past was the plea for further supplies of capital for develop- mental purposes. This amounted to a wish to perpetuate those very conditions of expanding debt which constituted the chief cause of this and every other major Australian crisis; and to an admission that the serious effects of the uneconomic use of borrowed capital were not realized. Nor was there any great measure of agreement to be found among economists or business men. Even so keen an observer as Copland appears to minimize the significance of this great dominating factor in Australian finance; or, rather, to over-emphasize the effects of internal inflation as compared with those of the foreign borrowing which in part made this inflation possible. ‘Too much has been made’, he says, ‘of abnormal war condi- tions and not enough of this inherent weakness (optimistic specu- lation during the boom) in business mgnagement. Yet it is a factor of overwhelming importance in explaining industrial con- ditions just prior to the crisis, and our present depression is, to a large extent, the result of an ordinary commercial crisis intensified by the extraordinary financial conditions (i.e. inflation) of recent vears.’ 1 The pertinent inquiry here, of course, concerns the interpreta- tion he put on the phrase ‘ordinary commercial crisis’. Of the reiterated connexion between crises and capital imports the reader will by now be wellnigh weary. But there seems little doubt that the ‘extraordinary financial conditions’ were in- timately connected with the adjustments of credit consequent upon the flow and ebb of capital from Britain ; and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that internal and external movements towards credit expansion were supplementary. [+ will be worth while at this stage to review briefly the onset of a crisis which was the prelude to a depression that has lasted, with brief interludes, until 1929. The first signs of recession in world business conditions came early in 1920, when an abrupt break in prices successively involved countries so widely sepa- rated and so differently organized as Japan, the United States, and Great Britain. The collapse was not long delayed in Austra- lia. The last phase of the boom had reached its climax in August 1920 some months after the first check had been experienced L Thid.. ». 583.

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: Borrowing and business in Australia

Monograph

Chapter

Table of contents

Download

Monograph

Chapter

This page

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation