International Clearing Union and Stabilization Fund.

I send you the following thoughts for what they are worth. These
two plans show great imagination and thought, and the expert
consideration that has gone to their construction should afford a
basis for the creation of an International financial mechanism
which will contribute to stability and make possible the expansion
of world trade which must be brought about if the ideas of
economic well being and social security visualized for the post
war world are to be achieved.

These two plans, however, are [only] [1] suggestions as to the
form which such mechanism should take. There is, in my view, a
grave danger that now the two plans have been made public a
controversy may develop round the methods which they respectively
contemplate with hardening schools of [thought] and opposing
groups in the course of which the objectives they are both
designed to achieve may be lost sight of.

The position as I see it is that the immediate problem is not to
provoke a technical and expert discussion upon ways and means but
to ensure political direction which will bring into the forefront
of people's minds the objectives which it is desired to achieve.

On ways and means there will be a great division of opinion-most
of it ill informed. On objectives it should be possible to get
agreement. These objectives are well set out in introductions
respectively to the International Clearing Union and the
Stabilization Funds plans. [2] In my mind, political direction
should be given down the lines of obtaining agreement from the
United Nations either by a meeting or by negotiation and having
obtained that endorsement of objectives a further agreement that
the problem of designing machinery should be referred to an expert
committee to which both the Clearing Union and Stabilization Fund
plans should be referred merely as suggested methods and that
pending a report by such expert committee, every effort should be
made to damp down public controversy.

BRUCE