THE HONGKONG Telegraph, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1988.
Life Begins at 8:01
ENGINEERING| leadership
GIVES IN ALL VAUXHALLS—
Ramarkable' Economy (20% more m.p.g.) Independent Springing (changes riding into gliding) Controlled Synchromesh
(you can't help making a good change}
No-Draught Ventilation (fresh air without shirars)
We will provide an adequete trial run on any Youxhall model, and demonstrate Its petrol economy.
HONGKONG HOTEL GARAGE
#
A Without a tu la
Stubbs Rd.
BURNETT'S
CELEBRATRO
LONDON
DRY GIN
Starts you off right
Sole Agents:—A. S. WATSON & CO,. LTD.
MOUTRIE'S
WINE DEPT..
FOR
TEL. 20616.
BRITISH RADIOS
G. E. C. ALL MODELS PYE.
ALL MODELS
TRIAL DEMONSTRATION SUITABLE TO YOUR CONVENIENCE
HIRE PURCHASE TERMS AVAILABLE
S. Moutrie & Co., Ltd.
YORK BUILDING
DINE at
CHATER ROAD.
Parisian Grill
10. Queen's Rd., C. (Wang Hing Bldg.)
Try Our Special Tiffins
Tel. 27880.
also a la carte
COUNT THE LEICAS EVERYWHERE
Leica
Leitz
ог
Let us demonstrate
write for Cainlogue T.312
Sole Agents:
SCHMIDT & CO., LTD.
¿YORK BLDG. - CHATER RD. - HONGKONG
Maintaining also-SPECJALIST LEICA SERVICE
Tel. 27778-9.
Vauxhall
TRY THE 10 AND 12 H.P.
The
Thongkong Telegraph.
SATURDAY, Decklider 3, 1938.
Pruning the Tree
How much are
we owed?
If people abroad paid their debts to Great Britain it would come to
£60 a head for each Englishman...
Another unsuccessful
the most alluring of foreign loang are worth floating these days,
In the case of loans to foreign Governments the principal and the interest are usually secured on the revenue from some good- yield tax, such as the Customs or a Government match monopoly.
THAT £10,000,000 loan to the Czechs wouldn't have attracted much of John Bull's capital if it had been put on the market in the ordinary. way. Most likely that was why the Government told the Bank of England to send the money along
loans.
loan struction of railways, and in right away without bothering 10 the Czechs are using scheme was started after the those days it was pretty certain about a private issue.
that teni million war under the eye of the League that if one wanted a railway one manding bigger securities and a Lately investors have been de- pounds Britain lent of Nations. Three million went to Great Britain for one's them the other day to buy pounds was doled out by Britain rolling-stock and locomotives. higher rate of interest for their German steel for bridge- to Bulgaria for the resettlement The money we 'lent was at least The £13,000,000 coffee realisa- building.
seven and a half million went to to-day the bondholders in the tion loan to Brazil was a sharp It makes one wonder about Greece; also for the resettlement majority of cases has not been lesson to them. The loan was foreign loans...why we make of refugees, Hungary, Danzig, repaid his capital, nor is he like made in 1980 and the security them...how much we are owed and Austria got hand-outs too, ly to see the return of a fraction was bags and bags of coffee. ...if we ever get paid back- bringing the total subscribed by of it).
of Bulgarian refugees. Another spent in this country (although
and what happens to the money, Great Britain up to thirty-seven But now there is no knowing bags was to be raised by a coffee-
anyway.
answer.
millions.
The value of the coffee in the
selling restriction scheme. The where Governments are going to restriction scheme did not work Take the question of how
place even their locomotive
out, and the investors are still much we are owed. It is cer- THE only country which orders.
has paid interest on At the worst what may hap coffee is going to rise. tainly the easiest of the four to
wondering when the price of
as You can find out a good these loans arranged is pen is this: A foreign Govern-
Expropriation schemes such deal by looking at the shilling Estonia, which borrowed just ment obtains a loan from Great as in Mexico have also jolted the Stock Exchange List, which over one million pounds.
Britain and uses the credit for confidence of British foreign In most cases the default story buying goods from a foreign bondholders. comes out every day. Its Page Four shows what the foreign has been the same. The money, country, leaving British trade Governments owe us.
which was intended to speed up no better off than it was before method of lending to foreigners Perhaps the most practical international trade, was spent by the loan.
these days is the one used by the RU USSIA is down for the borrowing Government on There is a committee attached Export Credit Guarantee De- about £300,000,000, social welfare work at home; on to the Treasury which is sup- partment of the Board of Trade. Japan for £75,000,000, Mexico roads, houses, fortifications, or posed to prevent this kind of This department allows export- for £60,000,000, Turkey for £42,- other things that did not have to thing from happening.
ers of British goods to insure 000,000, Rumania for £32,000,- be bought abroad.
The committee advises the Royal
themselves against losses due to 000, Portugal for £30,000,000,
As a result, trade did not perk Treasury which foreign loans the failure of customers abroad, recent not to mention the salt bonds up as expected; the revenues of are likely to benefit British trade and thus guarantees that credits
loan to Ecuador, the Egyptian the countries concerned failed to and which are not. (In most
given abroad are used for Bri- unified debt, and the Montenegro increase as quickly as had been cases the foreign Government or tish goods. Government loan, which is still hoped, and the British bond corporation applying for the loan The Export Credits Guarantee officially quoted.
holders went without their in- states what it wants the money Department does around £50,- Lerest.
for.) If the proposed loan is 000,000 worth of business a year,
SIR WILLIAM BRAGG, Presi-
dent of Britain's Society, urged, in # speech, the need for reducing the vast accumulation of out-
of-date textbooks that cumbers public and private libraries. It is high time that attention was directed to this problem.
Educational institutions in
together foreign Governments
Epidently foreign bonds go Next question: What happens likely to weaken the British ex- and has just recently raised its well on the Stock Exchange. Al- to the money wo lend? In the change position the committee turnover by passing a credit of have borrowed about £1,235,- days before the war, as grand- turns it down and no public issue £10,000,000 to Turkey. 000,000 from us. Besides this, father will agree, things were is made.
After the loan has been passed in Britain...That, if at all, is This £10,000,000 is to be spent much easier. During the nine- loans have been made to foreign teenth century Britain used to as "OK." by the advisory com- the way to lend money abroad. corporations and to commercial
lend money pretty regularly to mittee on foreign lending it can companies abroad.
Russia for work such as the con- be offered to the public. Only
Britain can be depended on, for the most part, to keep their books up to date; but the public
Most estimates agree that library, which is often firm on
these loans, including those made the point of excluding the to the Dominions and colonies, ephemeral novel, is seldom quick amount to £1,765,000,000. That to perceive the ephemeral text-means people abroad owe us
(around £3,000,000,000. book, and to exclude it when its day is over. Yet "lumber" no more deserves a place for being learned than for being lurid.
The many independent students, and inquiring laymen, who use these libraries, who cannot always avail themselves of expert advice on the choice of technical books, and must take what the hand finds on their subject, deserve that the same
effort be made as in the case of those who read for pleasure, to
help them to avoid wasting their
time.
If they all paid at once We would get about £60 each.
Next question: Why do we lend money abroad, anyway?
The answer is that we hope to make a profit out of the deal.
Before the war, 09 grand- father will probably tell you, we used to get paid interest pretty regularly.
this sum includes dividends from
and rubber interests.
T. PAUL GREGORY tells
John Fisher
The Story of A Miraculous
Herb
an ancient
FEW of the economic bears a striking resem-GINSENG has been known in plants of the world have blance to the legs of a China from the most ancient Just how much interest we are
now is
another a more interesting story human being. This latter times, and it is said that in old Chinese books many of its heal- getting paid matter. Experts put the figure than ginseng the Bover-factor, naively argue the ing properties were discovered at something like £220,000,000.eign herb of the entire vege- native herbalists, is suffi- by Shen Nung.
Don't forget, though, that table kingdom. As is well cient proof that Nature in-worthy who is popularly re- the "Father of the Empire and the U.S.A. (who known, the masses of the tended it to be a specific for garded are the best payers) as well as Chinese people ascribe to it the relief of human ills; for Agriculture and the Aesculapian
Art" as long ago as 8,000 B. C. from our own large tin, copper the most miraculous cura- is it not true that all objects Although the plant has al- tive powers, a belief which beneficial to man bear some ways been highly esteemed, it What About the Ocean?
Next question: Do we ever is strangely enough en-marks indicative of the par-was not until the fifteenth cen- & systematic A LADY is just reported to get paid back?
hanced by the fact that its ticular use to which each tury A. P. that
listing of its remedial usages Grandfather will tell you that forked, have lived for eighty-eight
carrot - like root ought to be put?
were compiled in the Pen Trao | Kung Mu, à book which is still years in a village in Bedford-up till 1914 hardly anybody de-
considered the standard author- shire, England, without ever
It was as safe to lend to Russin having seen the sen. It would as it was to Montenegro or any be interesting to have her of the Central European Powers. reactions to that remarkable
Somehow the war changed all that: natural phenomenon. Her long- maintained indifference suggests she is the person to put it in its place.
faulted.
tish investors at once lost three Russia set the pace when Bri-
hundred million pounds..
Our bondholders are still hop-
ing that the U.S.S.R. will give them something for bonds issued in Czarist times, but you can buy an 1822 £100 Russian bond for half a crown these days.
The sea, of course, has been the subject of a good deal of comment in its time. Most of it has been adulatory—indeed, al-
The Dawes and Young loans most sycophantic. Sailors have
to Germany soaked us for an- treated it with respect, and other £30 million, and the rate of poots with admiration and awe. interest on them was reduced They have emphasized its again only a few months ago, vastness and its grandeur. "The after Hitler marched into Aus
tria. multitudinous laughter of the
sen," said Aeschylus more than majesty of the ocean for the a score of centuries ago; and
first time. One, of a practical pacts have gone on like that ever turn of thought, Instantly re- since. It must all be very trygarded it as a branch of ing to whatever sense of
plumbing, and, exclaimed, "OW modesty the sea has...
The balance has, however, been somewhat restored by the observations of Beveral London County Council school children the who recently gazed on
}
do they fill it up, miss?”
When Neptune.next meditates the magniloquent praises of the poets, the comments of these children should be a useful counterweight to his vanity.
GRIN
AND BEAR IT By Lichty ity of the native school of
PRIATE
Ören 2006 by talked Fration frudíczia, Ban
"I don't want one with more than five murder-there's" enough trouble in this world with out me reading about it.".
medicine. In this work some 2,500 Chinese characters are de- voted to explaining the superla- tive excellence of the plant, which incidentally was included in the list of articles of tribute exacted by the Emperor from the tributary kingdom of Korea. When it is realised that a special root of ginseng, say 3 or 4 inches in length, will often fetch as much as H.K. $200, one has an idea of its peculiar value in Chinese eyes.
#k
*
IN FACT, strange as it may
IN
appear, ginseng was one of the earliest articles of com- merce, and there is a romantic Chinese myth that the peopling of the neighbouring Japanese islands was effected by an an- cient monarch of a State of the Middle Kingdom who despatch- ed some one hundred youths and maidens in an effort to dis- cover it. Thoir search, how- ever, was fruitless, and fearing the wrath of their ruler if they should return without it, they settled on the island of Hondo, and became the ancestors of the present-day Nippon race.
Of course, such a story in without any sure historical (Continued on Page:9.).
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.