Page:Bankers and Credit (1924).pdf/248

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recent failure to produce a big trade balance in her favour. If she was really capturing the world's markets as fast as Mr. Kitson and other people thought, her trade with the rest of the world should surely have been on a basis most satisfactory to herself. Yet we find that when a bevy of foreign experts, including Professor Cassel of Stockholm, Professor Jenks of New York, Mr. R. H. Brand, a partner in Lazard Brothers' London house, and Mr. J. M. Keynes, went to Berlin in the Autumn of 1922, at the German Government's invitation, to advise it concerning measures for the stabilization of the mark, it was faced by the difficulty, among many others, of determining whether the adverse balance of trade which was alleged to make stabilization impossible without help from outside, really existed. Finding itself unable to arrive at solid results from the figures supplied to it by the German Government, it made calculations of its own which brought it to the conclusion that the adverse trade balance could not be very great.

In view of the wild fluctuations in the mark it was naturally very difficult for Germany to present any trade figures which gave anything like a true picture of her trade, and the report of these sympathetic experts seemed to confirm the general belief that Germany—as was