INTERNATIONAL: Roosevelt Money

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When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was first swaddled, Japan's present Finance Minister was already approaching middle age. Today a tottering but keen-witted patriarch, Mr. Korekiyo Takahashi was the first statesman of world prominence to seize last week on President Roosevelt's devaluation project as a basis for local action.

Calling in Tokyo correspondents, Mr. Takahashi revealed that his Finance Ministry was rushing into shape a bill to make ''Roosevelt money" out of the yen—i.e. to devalue it and presumably pounce on the profit to be had by seizing gold held by Japanese citizens and banks.

"If America returns to the gold standard with the gold content of the dollar reduced, as seems likely," Mr. Takahashi said, "Japan probably will be compelled thereafter to devalue the yen similarly in order to resume gold payments. Preparations for such an eventuality will be necessary to strengthen the nation's gold reserves."

Same day in Canada, where seizure of private property is repugnant to every Methodist fibre of rich and pious Premier Richard Bedford Bennett, the project of reducing the gold content of the Canadian dollar—without confiscation—became an active issue in the Dominion Press. Usually well posted, Toronto's Globe said that Premier Bennett was expected shortly to ask Parliament to devalue the Canadian dollar 33⅓%.

"The adoption by statute of such a lower gold content of the Canadian dollar would," said the Globe, "undoubtedly have widespread reaction. It would in due time reduce by one-third the burden of all indebtedness payable in Canadian currency, and would tend to increase prices of commodities in the domestic trade of Canada in similar proportion."

In South Africa wild rumors that "Roosevelt will buy unlimited foreign gold," caused a near riot on Johannesburg 'Change as frantic brokers bid up "kaffirs" (mining shares) to dizzy highs on orders from London and towns all over South Africa.

Meanwhile Argentina, which pegged her peso to the French franc when sterling went off gold, pegged back to sterling last week as South Americans awaited a "devaluation race" between the dollar and the pound. Stormed bellicose Baron Beaver-brook's Daily Express in London: "The revalued dollar demands an answer and the British answer should be a revalued pound. A great world currency war has been begun by President Roosevelt and he will fight America's trade battle with £400,000,000 of conscripted gold."

In the eyes of French editors, long used to Marxian proposals for a capital levy or seizure of prosperous people's wealth, President Roosevelt's devaluation move seemed precisely that. They concluded that his 40% to 50% devaluation of the dollars in every U. S. citizen's pocket will so cheapen the U. S. national debt that in "real money" it will be less under President Roosevelt this year than it was under President Hoover.