Economists

The extraordinary dislocation of finance and currencies which has resulted from the War has left many practical business men quite confused as to the remedies needed to rectify the situation. Accordingly, the professional economists, previously considered as mere theoreticians by practical business, have been appealed to as never before in an endeavor to analyze the present and recommend regarding the future.

The question of whether or no Britain is to replace sterling on a gold basis has drawn businessmen, bankers, economists and others into a keen controversy. Recently, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald McKenna and the sensational John Maynard Keynes were called to the bar of the House of Lords to give their views on the gold question. Mr. McKenna was in favor of resuming gold pay ments; not so Mr. Keynes. The latter, has by now developed an instinctive hatred of anything suggestive of currency and price deflation. Revision to a gold standard, he says, would merely render Britain subservient to the U. S., which has most of the world's gold sup ply. What he wants is a "managed" paper currency, stabilized in relation to a fixed internal purchasing power based on commodity values. Such a system, he. says, is more advantageous than -- and far superior to -- gold currency.

Mr. Benjamin M. Anderson, economist of the Chase National Bank, Manhattan, has entered the lists on the other side. Mr. Anderson, in upholding the gold standard as against the "managed currency" proposal, naturally encounters the theories of Mr. Keynes. He refers to them .as "a refined and subtle form of greenbackism," declares that it is safer to trust gold's fluctuation in value than it is to trust politicians' "management" of a paper currency without any outside check or limits on their operations.