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 monetary conditions are unfavourable to a new loan in the open market it is possible that temporary credits may be arranged in a foreign centre and included under some heading such as floating debt, which does not give the information needed.

Whether any country balances its Budget—or rather, in most cases, the extent to which it fails to do so—is a matter that is as difficult to guess as we shall find it on later pages difficult to know what is the real profit or loss that an industrial company has made. We believe in England that our Government balances its Budget and we hope that we are right because a sum of £45 to £50 millions, yearly devoted to debt redemption, gives us a handsome margin on which to come and go. But if we tried to be exact, how much do we know about the arrears of taxation carried over each year? The sum of these arrears must be enormous, and variations in it might make a substantial difference to a year's accounts.

On the subject of 4 there is a definite record that tells one the actual facts about the exchange value of a country's currency not furnished by its official documents but by the dealings in it on the exchange markets of the world. We can really find out exactly what the rupee or the franc or the milreis has been