| OCR Text |
Show PROBLEM OF MORE GOLD IS VEXING Cost of Mining Yellow Metal Has Raised Difficult Diffi-cult Question. ANGLES SEEM MANY United States and England Are Both Busy With Ef-forts Ef-forts at Solution. The cost of mining gold in the great goldfields of the world is creating a new kind of " currency problem." The price of gold appears to be fixed because be-cause of its happening to be the standard stand-ard ci vahie; so many grains of gold to the poun4, dollar, etc.. being the ' method of standardizing the coinage of the money of the "gold standard " countries, it is inherently impossible to maintain gold parity and at the same time have gold, as commodity, advance ad-vance In price like everything else in the world. We have apparently come, in this war-time situation when we are seeing the fundamentals of finance as related to production and goods, to the point where the cost of running a gold mine is so high that gold either "will have to bring a higher price or the mines must suspend.- In South Africa, according to tne recent reports of the meetings of the mining companies, com-panies, the cost of getting gold is so high as to have compelled the British - government to enter into some arrangement, arrange-ment, the terms of which are not disclosed, dis-closed, although specific reference to it is made. In this country, also, the matter has come up in a serious problem. prob-lem. . Cannot Reduce Coin. Any proposal to put a smaller amount of gold into the standard coins, and so raise the price of gold by changing the standard, is declared by practical financiers finan-ciers and experts upon the subject to be out of the question. It would at once disturb the whole monetary situation, situa-tion, and as a readjustment would be faced wh?n the reaction of prices that is ahead of us comes, we would have to undergo a double disturbance. aDd the expectancy of it would gravely affect credit. It would not even relieve the mining situation to debase the dollar, for costs, in terms of "dollars," would rise as the gold value was reduced, and the whole proceeding would be merely - juggling with words. The problem is undoubtedly rendered more difficult by the fact of restriction restric-tion of free sale and ot" the export of gold, as a war measure. On August "9 the assay office at New York was ordered or-dered by the government not to sell any more gold bars to jewelers and others for ''use in the arts' till further notice. no-tice. It is reported from "Washington that the secretary of the treasury has asked congre-s to adopt a law against hoarding gold. The exportation of gold is restricted. Gold for manufacturing I uses might sell at a premium, and it is 1 believed that if our mining companies were free to export gold tbey would be able, for a time at least, to find markets mar-kets abroad, for instance in Spain, where gold would be at a premium as against the dollar credit, and even absolutely, abso-lutely, and thus they might recoup themselves and incidentally help to get our trade balances even up on a casb instead of a credit basis. Such export would possibly be difficult to accomplish accom-plish without running the chance of helping Germany in some way. However, How-ever, the restriction of gold exports is 'generally ascribed as much to financial j reasons the desire to have a large j ..-store of gold for general credit stabilization stabili-zation as to "euemy trade" considerations, consid-erations, and it would seem as if the j restrictions on domestic sale for manufacturing, manu-facturing, and on export, were calculated calcu-lated to bold down trie price. Affects Our Man-power. There is another phase of the question, ques-tion, and that concerns the "manpower" "man-power" Bnpply for war purposes. We need coal more than gold if the gold miners were transferred to coal mining jt would probably be an advantage, considering onlv the present conditions. But we will ultimately need the gold, and it would be dangerous to permit 1 - our gold production to be demoralised. Evidently the Britih iverument has aeen fit to givc artifici J support to tbc I gold mining on the Ro til. It has been suggested that the soundest way to - solve the whole problem raised by the coat of gold mining, under conditions of general price-levels and labor shortage, short-age, which are regarded as temporary, would be for the government to pay bonuses for tbc production of the gold, inst as they are practically putting a bonus on wheat production, and thus to tide the industry ocr; for even the " practical economists, who deplore general gen-eral credit inflation, which has given ' ufc so much credit, currency in place of gold as to be responsible for gold being go out of line a regards its price on B commodity bajus, say that any interruption inter-ruption of the normal production of ((old, which would affect the supply for a term of years, would be equally deplorable, de-plorable, as it would intensify the reaction re-action from the present period of infla lion, when it comes. Mining and Scientific Scien-tific Press from "Tho Americas." |
