14 - 1930 – Current problems in international finance

Summary

I am very conscious of the fact that lecturers on this endowment have in the past been chosen on the ground of their personal distinction, and I cannot hope to address you with that particular qualification; but I can claim at least this, that at no time in the history of Australia did those eminent men have to discuss problems more immediate and more urgent than those which form the material of what I have to say this evening. What I want to discuss I have labelled Current Problems of International Finance, but what I really want to deal with are the problems which arise, and have been arising in the last ten years, out of the peculiar monetary organization of the modern world.

Now it has long been held up against economists of all schools that they are unnecessarily abstract in dealing with the problems of life, and in particular of business organizations. If we have been abstract, it is nothing in comparison with the actual abstractness of the monetary systems of the modern world. We are all of us in a way the creatures of an illusion. We see around us, in Australia as elsewhere, magnificent cities and still more magnificent buildings. Wherever we go we are faced by the tangible and by the concrete, and we naturally think that a body of men who spend their time reducing these great realities to abstract ideas are not in touch with the realities which they describe.