Inquest on the Crisis

Lionel Robbins

Chapter 15 in Economic Science and Political Economy, 1997, pp 205-227 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract It may be remembered that, when Mr. Churchill addressed the House of Commons on the morrow of the Munich Agreement, the first thing he emphasized was that we had suffered a major defeat. Similarly in any review of the present economic crisis, the first thing that must be stated is that we are the victims of a dreadful catastrophe. So far the weather has been so good and the issues involved have been so technical that it has almost seemed that, despite much fluttering in high quarters, the average citizen has tended to regard the breakdown of the experiment in convertibility and the virtual exhaustion of our dollar resources as a matter of comparative indifference. But this state of opinion cannot persist. As the winter comes on, as our rations are cut and our amenities (such as they are) abolished, we shall all realize only too vividly that, for the urban inhabitants of a tightly-packed island, such as our own, to be caught with an adverse annual balance of payments of some six hundred millions sterling, and inadequate reserves to cover it, is no minor incident. It is the biggest disaster in our long economic history.

Keywords: Current Account; Consumption Good; Import Price; Breathing Space; External Asset (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-12761-0_16

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349127610

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-12761-0_16

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().