Borrowing and business in Australia

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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

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

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

Collection:: Economics Books

TRADE BETWEEN 1914 AND 1928 189 for its various payments, and then used and spread broadcast by the contractors, merchants, manufacturers, farmers, soldiers, into whose hands the “money” flowed. The really significant operations were purely domestic—quite divorced for the time being from international trade.’ But a halt had to be called some time, and a period set to both the abnormal excess of exports and the rise in prices, and this was brought about by the natural death of war-time Anancial measures. ‘The revulsion did not take place immediately. For a few months succeeding the armistice there was a halt, a taking of breath as it were. Then the business world (in Australia as elsewhere) made an endeavour to resume and maintain the mad pace of the war... a stage of release and buoyance, and then at last the slow and bitter process of recovery from the lasting effects of the desperate struggle.’? In this recovery from the manifold excesses of the years be- tween 1914 and 1020 is to be sought the explanation of the economic difficulties in Australia for the next decade. The historian of the future may tease out from the tangled skein the main threads which still run through the fabric of business, and may indicate unfalteringly the chief controls in what appears, at this distance, little better than a chaotic and depressing tangle defying our best efforts to unravel. In one important respect the theory presented here quite fails to fit the facts of the post-war situation. The movements of group prices were too disturbed and spasmodic, the distortion of the whole field of prices too great in consequence of the de- Aation policies being pursued at home and abroad, to enable us to detect those phenomena connected with group prices which were indicated for the more normal pre-war period. Changes in domestic price-levels, due to the reaction from the extra- ordinary internal inflation that had occurred, were too over- whelming in their effects to enable the relatively fainter trends due to the borrowing cycle to be clearly discerned, although the conviction that these weaker currents were present in the main stream remains. Here again the explanation has to be sought in the fact that the gold standard—the regulator of the relative price-levels for our purpose—had ceased to operate for the 1 Paussio. op. cil., parenthesis by present writer.

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