Mr Lloyd’s Fireworks

I have called this paper ‘Mr Lloyd’s Fireworks’ not in order to suggest either that by his ‘July Measures’ Mr Lloyd was trying to give us all a great treat, or that he was indulging in a fit of exhibitionist self-advertisement, but simply because the metaphor seems to me helpful towards classification. Broadly speaking, fireworks are of three kinds: the noisy squibs which go off immediately round one’s feet and hurt one if one gets in the way: the things like Catherine wheels and Roman candles which take longer to develop their full beauty: and finally what most of us like best of all — the great rockets which go whizzing up into the sky and keep us for a long time on tenterhooks as to whether they are going to explode at all and what will come out of them if they do. Just so Mr Lloyd had his squibs — the various constituents of the credit squeeze, as in 1957 only more so, about which there isn’t really much more to be said, except that this time hardly anyone has been found to argue either that they were unnecessary or that they are being ineffective, though of course some people will say that he oughtn’t to have let things get to such a pass that he had to use them. Then he had his medium-range pieces of the temporary wage pause in Government-paid or Government-influenced occupations, the working out of which we have got to watch over the next few months. But finally, rather unobtrusively he tossed into the air a couple of long-range rockets about the contents of which most of us at present know very little, but which may prove in the long run to be the most important elements of the whole package. Their names are Investment Planning and what has hitherto been generally called Wages Policy, but is perhaps better described as Income Planning. There seems little doubt that in Mr Lloyd’s mind they are closely connected; but they are not, I think, necessarily connected; it is conceivable, at any rate on some interpretations, that one could have one and not the other. Anyway, up to a point at least, they can be discussed separately.