Credit Squeeze
$112,—Strix, in his Endpaper of July 9, has the fol. lowing paragraph:
Mr. E, the manager of our village shop, has put a large notice up in his window. Pinned to the top of it is a cheque for £7, marked 'Return to Drawer.' Underneath appears the following legend: This cheque was issued by Mr. R. We cashed it for Mrs. M.
It bounced. State of the Parties 1. Mr. R 4 £7
2. Mrs. M £7 3. Mr. E --E7 To make good this"loss we shall need to sell 11,000 cigarettes.
Now, sir, I realise that Strix is providing us with a light-hearted tailpiece; may I offer the following comments in case any of your readers are taking the paragraph seriously?
(a) The loss cannot be made good by the sale of cigarettes. Mr. 'R has, by 30 seconds' work with his pen, misappropriated half a week's work of the grocer; the £7 worth of consumer goods have, bY now, presumably been consumed. The redress that Mr. R can make is to work for 20 hours for the grocer (say stocktaking), or, to strike a more general balance for socicty at large, by undertaking 20 hours of voluntary unpaid work of any useful kind.
(b) The grocer (or rather Mr. R) seems to have found a simple way of increasing total wealth. Both Mr. R and Mrs. M are up by £7, but the grocer is down by £7—a net increase of £7, attributable solely to the writing of a rubber cheque. The grocer's loss of £7 must be divided between Mr. R and Mrs. M according to their, relative culpability, but so that together they are up by only £7; the position becomes clear if, for example, Mrs. M is regarded as Mr. R's wife. (c) If you will permit, sir, an elephantine moral to be drawn from this lightweight tale, it would• be this: The grocer presumably posted his notice believing it to represent the truth, and, regrettably, Strix reproduces it in the same belief. By extension, it seems possible that successive amateur Chancellors of the Exchequer have had equally little mathemati- cal and logical ability—if so, the economic diffi- culties of this country may have quite a simple ex- planation.
Peter/ware, Cambridge
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