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OCR Page 1 of 1610/20/53 - Reel 1, track 2 - Page 1
MR. ACHOSSON: He said they were working on markets which he understood were in some
sense umproductive, this block sterling gave the British highly
protected markets which they didn't have to work very hard for, but
at least there was very considerable employment, and pseudo-prosperity
in England. If they gave all that up and turned to the United States,
the first thing they would discover was that they didn't have anything.
That vas regarded as not very far-sighted by some of our participants.
They then got on to talking about such things as stock piling. At
this time there was a great falling off in the price of rubber and
members RECORDS ADMIN TRUNDAY
CATIONAL
tin and some of the dollar earners of the British colonial empire.
We tried to get our people to pitch in and help, and we
immediately ran into the greatest possible difficulties. For instance,
in rubber: that raised the whole question of the synthetic rubber
production. That got Charlie Sawyer all tangled uo with that munitions
board, and instead of having one or two people who could
go to the President and get a decision, you had 8. great vast bureau-
cratic labyrinth to go through, so that when you broke your back on
getting increased purchases abroad, you finally came out with something
which was too small to do the British any good, and big enough to
cause a great deal of trouble in the American Government. The same
thing happened with a good many of the proposals that we had up. I
remember one that the British were upset about. The ECA funds avail-
able to the British vere doing them no good at all, because they
had so many restrictions as to what you could use these dollars under
EDA for, that they could only be used for things that the British did
not want to help their dollar position, and they could not be used for
the things that the British did want to have dollars for. Well, we
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