"Vicious Circles"

To cap German murmurings for a moratorium on Reparations payments (TIME, Oct. 27), came last week a clear-cut statement from Minister of Labor Adam Stegerwald.

"What we must have," he barked, "is not a moratorium but a complete revision of the Young plan of Reparations payments!"

"How much, then, is Germany really able to pay?" asked a correspondent.

Crisply Dr. Stegerwald shot back:

"If Germany's financial burden were a normal one we might logically consider keeping on paying approximately two billion marks [about $480,000,000] annual reparations. As it is, we simply cannot go on with it. Adding the interest on foreign loans the total comes up to three billion marks [about $720,000,000] yearly, while we are burdened beforehand with immense internal expenditures resulting from liquidation of the War and the necessity of providing subsistence for several million of our people who are suffering from enforced idleness. We must take care of more than 3,000,000 unemployed now, and the number will increase to more than 4,000,000 during the winter."*

Starting out on a new tack Dr. Stegerwald summed his position thus: "The nations collecting reparations from Germany must understand we can pay only from what we derive from selling them goods.

"The result is one of those famous 'vicious circles.' Even in case our export trade yielded us a surplus sufficient to pay the three billion marks we owe every year, our creditors would still be paying out of their own pockets a large part of what they were collecting from us. This indisputable fact in my opinion, leads to only one solution. We cannot keep up for long meeting the demands of the Young plan."

*German government figures.

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