334 
INTERNATIONAL TRADE 
of all, and perhaps most unpredictable of all, is the way in which 
the monetary mechanism will operate. Will the currency system 
of the country remain as insensitive to gold movements as it 
came to be during the war and post-war periods? Will the whole 
enormous gold stock be retained within the country? And if not, 
what will be the method and what the results of its re-distribution ? 
Will deliberate policy and plans for a managed currency determine 
its movements, or will its international distribution proceed after 
all in that undesigned fashion which has so long been regarded as 
part of the normal economic order? And, to come to our imme- 
diate subject, by what processes will the currents of international 
trade be influenced? It may be presumed with confidence that 
the fundamental actuating forces in the movement of merchandise 
will still be the prices of goods in the several countries, and the 
relative levels of their domestic prices and their money incomes. 
But just how the prices of American goods, and the country’s 
general level of domestic prices and money incomes, will shape 
themselves or will be shaped under the newly developed banking 
and currency situation — he would be a rash man who ventured 
to predict. And hence he would also be rash who ventured on 
a prediction as to the ultimate structure of the country’s 
international trade, of its merchandise exports and imports, of its 
balance of payments with other countries, of the greater or less 
extent of its real gain from the total of all the transactions 
taken together.