policy which is to be complicated by the deliberate intervention of the Treasury, which would be dangerously open to pressure from interested parties in Parliament.
When he comes to positive suggestions for the future regulation of money, Mr. Keynes says that hitherto the Treasury and the Bank of England have "looked forward to the stability of the dollar exchange (preferably to the pre-war parity) as their objective." His scheme "would require that they should adopt the stability of sterling prices as their primary objective." If they did so, Mr. Keynes doubts the "wisdom and practicability" of so cut and dried a system as Professor Fisher's, which is to work merely by reference to an index number, without any play of judgment or discretion. "If," he says, "we wait until a price movement is actually afoot before applying remedial measures, we may be too late. . . . Actual price movements must of course provide the most important datum; but the state of employment, the volume of production, the effective demand for credit as felt by the banks, the rate of interest on investments of various types, the volume of new issues, the flow of cash into circulation, the statistics of foreign trade and the level of the exchanges must all be taken into account. The main
