The Ape and the Quicksilver
IDO not understand about finance, and I never shall. You have only got to see me paying a taxi-driver to divine that there must be something amiss in my relations with Mammon. I seem to have no effective control over the coins in my hand; I give the impression of some great, well- meaning ape who holds quicksilver in the palm of one paw and is trying to pick it out with the other paw. There is (let us say) six shillings on the clock. My intention is to give the driver seven shillings. I rarely achieve it. I become confused by the sixpences and shillings and florins and half-crowns slithering about among the pennies and threepenny bits, like petits bourgeois trying to hide behind proletarians during a purge.
`Sorry to have taken so long,' I say at length, handing the driver either five and ninepence or eight shillings. Whether I have underpaid or overpaid him, the fact that I did not mean to do so and did not realise that I had is beyond his comprehension.
Except that I invariably give alms to street-musicians- provided I see them in time and can go through the (for me) rather tricky business of selecting a coin while on the march, without having to halt and make the deed conspicuous ;all my habits in monetary matters are bad. When my children first asked me to help them divide (say) £2 9s. 6d. by 4s. ld., I used to pretend that I was too busy, but I have since been forced to admit that their suspicions are right, and that I am no longer intellectually capable of such tasks. When I make out a cheque for £5, I write on it 'Five pounds' and never `Five pounds only,' which seems to me a rude and distrustful thing to do. God knows how many times cunning forgers have mulcted me of nineteen and elevenpence.
When endorsing cheques to which I am instructed, for inscrutable reasons, to affix a twopenny stamp when the sum involved exceeds £2, I do no such thing. Years ago a cheque bearing these instructions was forwarded to me in Manchuria, a land where, though it is rich in other resources, no twopenny stamps are to be had; and I carried the cheque about the Far East for more than the six months within which, I believe, the banks require cheques to be presented. I think I got the money in the end, but I resolved never again to expose myself to the risk of having to freeze funds, if that is the right expres- sion, for lack of a twopenny stamp. Since then these stamps have been affixed, if at all, by my bank.
If individuals differ, as they certainly do, in their aptitude for finance, may not nations also differ? I have a theory that the wasting sickness which grips the British economy, and which appears to be quite incurable, is basically due to the fact that the British are.very bad at dealing with money but think they are very good, thus making matters worse.
I tried this theory out after dinner the other night on a pillar of the merchant banking world who really understands about convertibility, soft currencies, the sterling area and all the rest of the mumbo-jumbo, to whom the price-structure is a mechanism no more complex than a shooting-stick, and who possesses; in addition, wisdom. The idea was novel to him and he did not seem to think much of it. The politicians, he explained, had committed us to spending more on the Welfare State and on armaments than our war-ravaged economy could stand; therefore taxes had to be so high, and for ideological reasons to be so graduated as to penalise success, that there was small incentive to make money. The Bank of England was weak, the Treasury clueless and the trade unions strong; hence the adverse trade balance, the rising cost of living, the dwindling gold reserves and the rest of the vicious spiral. It was as simple as that.
I said I was trying to suggest that it was even simpler: that we just were not, as a nation, good enough at running our financial affairs.
'We are,' I said, 'supposed to be a resourceful and funda- mentally reliable race. The war ended eleven years ago. We were in a hole then; we seem to be in the same hole now, and although there may be light at the end of the tunnel no one even claims to descry it. You talk' (I said, though he had only mentioned it briefly) 'of the Groundnuts Scheme. Why not bring in the South Sea Bubble, or for that matter the Black Death?'
`You say that this Chancellor of the Exchequer was an ass, that that one was a visionary and that a third failed to rise to the occasion. You may be right. If you were explaining to me the dilemma of some Central American republic, reft by dissension between two powerful factions with wholly incom- patible views on what needed to be done for the general good, I should listen to your diagnosis with respect and should refrain from investing my money, if I had any, in the municipal tram- ways serving the capital of so ill-circumstanced a State. But we are speaking of Great Britain, are we not?'
`I was,' said my friend, rather drowsily.
'Our country,' I remorselessly continued, 'suffered grave injury in the last war. But she was not conquered. Her prin- cipal cities, though damaged, were not reduced to rubble; her factories were not blown up; half her territories were not sequestered to the control of Soviet Russia; she was not occupied by garrisons for whose upkeep she had to pay; her self-confidence was not shattered, but rather the reverse.'
'Germany,' my friend pointed out, 'has only a token defence programme.'
'She may be fortunate in that respect,' I admitted, 'but nothing you have said explains to me why she should, starting from a long way behind scratch, be so much more fortunate in others than we are. It says in my newspaper that she now holds more gold and dollars than we do, that she sells more cars and more ships and is in every way richer than the United Kingdom. No doubt she has deserved to do so well. But how have we deserved to do so badly? Can you—taking into account all the perquisites of a conqueror, all the assets represented by our national character, all the advantages derived from our Empire and all the benefits bestowed on us by the kindly Americans—can you seriously contend that our economic failure is not due to some inherent and unsuspected incapacity in matters of finance?'
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