An enormous drain of bullion to the East Indies and China went on for months, and then came one of the greatest commercial disasters which had ever visited a commercial country, the Crisis in the United States of America—a disaster so great that its effects are not limited to this country, but as I saw by the papers of that morning, are more severely felt in Hamburg than in London or Liverpool.
Perhaps I ought to add that in the past six months there has been some setback, owing partly to the famine, partly owing to the Crisis in the United States, and India has suffered as other communities have done.
Furthermore, India, like the rest of the world, suffered from the general financial stringency following on the commercial Crisis in the United States of America.
Read the speeches of the present Crisis in the United States.
I say it is evident that they are, because, if you take the year of the financial Crisis in the United States, was it not the case that on that occasion the people of Europe ceased to go to the United States and even came back?
Mr. ARTHUR MICHAEL SAMUEL asked the Prime Minister whether he will for the guidance of British firms producing for home consumption, request the Committee of Civil Research to examine and report upon the ultimate reaction upon employment caused by inflation of power to purchase unreproductive luxuries and the effect the creation of consumers' credit by the instalment system has had upon the financial and industrial Crisis in the United States of America?
We can continue along the path outlined in this Bill, heading towards a system that in the next 10 years could very much resemble the current criminal justice Crisis in the United States: more prisons; less security; more lives ruined.
I listened to the comments made by the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton, and I should like to make a correction: no one is blaming this Government for the sub-prime Crisis in the United States - I am happy to put that on the record and I am sure that my Conservative colleagues would assent to that.
My Lords, given that the sub-prime Crisis in the United States was caused in the first place by government interference requiring lenders to lend money in an unsafe way, should we not be very wary about interfering in the lending decisions of building societies or others, however important the social issues are?
I appreciated the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Flight, and the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, a moment or two ago, that we have to be careful with regard to this issue because we know that it was overborrowing for house purchasing that precipitated the Crisis in the United States.