When sometime ago I made a good guess at the value of the British holdings of United States stocks and Our dollar balances, those who knew the truth remained silent and those who thought they knew indicated the figure was on the absurdly low side. And now the Federal Reserve Board in the United States has published its own official figures estimating the value of the British holdings of marketable securities at the end of August as $735,000,000.
1t computes the French and British dollar balances at $910,000,000 which makes the figure I gave for the value of the British securities and balances as $1,500,000,000 as near corr guessing will ever take you. Th course, is only part of the story for the combined French and British resources, which include also invest-
And with all this there should be a grain of comfort, for it looks as though the United States may eventually be sold back to the Americans. it won't be such a bad purchase either, for in spite of the careful husbanding of our dollar resources the United States must be in for a boom. The prevalent fear that our Treasury will call in the British-Owned securities soon, sounds to me a little hysterical. I can only see this problem from the severely practical point of view, and making a reasonable guess as to what we are spending in the United States today.
I have a feeling that the interest on our United States investments plus the gold from our Empire—and adding thereto our exports of tin and rubber—will' take care of our dollar expenditures for some time to come. To mobilize our American securities today would be a psychological mistake for it would indicate a weakness that is neither apparent nor real The French and British co-opera tion on financial and economical problems concerning the aims and the needs of the two countries will probably turn out to be one of the most far-reaching measures of the present decade. The pooling of the joint holdings of gold and foreign assets; the free interconvertibility of francs and sterling for purchases through our two Empires. and the consequent close ce-operation of the two Trea-sunes on price policies and the elimination of competition for raw materials, sounds a little like a theorist's dream. It is none the less a fact,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.