March MONEY PLAN OBSCURITIES This newspaper received a letter from Robert Boothby, which it pub- lished on March 4, and a second letter, which it published on March 14, re- ferring to the Bretton Woods agree- ments. Mr. Boothby is a Member of Parliament and chairman of the Mone- tary Policy Committee in London. In both letters Mr. Boothby pointed to what he called certain "major ob- scurities" in the Bretton Woods Mon- etary Fund agreement, and he pointed out that regarding several of them precisely the opposite interpretations had been made in Great Britain from those generally made here: You have been led to believe that the Bretton Woods proposals take us all back along the road to a gold standard, currency stability, non-discrimination and multilateral trade. We have been assured that they constitute the exact reverse of a gold standard, that exchange rates will be flexible and that reciprocal trade agreements involving discrim- ination will be permissible. Treasury spokesmen, discussing Mr. Boothby's contentions before the House Banking and Currency Committee, do not appear to have dealt with them very satisfactorily. They questioned Mr. Boothby's motives and his pur- pose in being in this country at this time. Such personal considerations do not meet the real issue, which is, Do the obscurities and ambiguities which Mr. Boothby alleges to be in the Bret- ton Woods agreement in fact exist? There can be not the slightest doubt that they do. Widely different inter- pretations have been made of the Fund agreement here and in London. It was Lord Keynes, leader of the British dele- gation at Bretton Woods, who declared before the House of Lords: "If I have any authority to pronounce on what is and what is not the essence and mean- ing of a gold standard, I should say that this plan is the exact opposite of it." It is Lord Keynes, also, who in a letter to The Times of London con- tended that the Bretton Woods plans would still permit Britain to make purely regional trade and currency ar- rangements, a view that has been dis- puted in the United States. There has developed in addition a vital difference of opinion concerning whether the credit granted by the Fund is auto- matic, regardless of unsound currency or other economic policies in the bor- rowing countries, or whether the Fund has a right to withhold credit because of such policies. Wholly apart from Mr. Boothby's personal motives, in short, he is cor- rect when he writes that "Nothing could be more deleterious to the future of Anglo-American relations than that the two countries should sign an agree- ment, each thinking that it means something quite different." It simply does not make sense for the United States, Great Britain or any other country to commit itself to the Bretton Woods Fund agreement without know- ing precisely what it has committed itself to. There are several ways in which the problem might be dealt with. Congress might accept the Fund subject to an explicit set of understandings or in- terpretations on essential points at present left in obscurity. A much bet- ter course in every respect, however, would be for the Administration to withdraw the Fund proposal at this time, to ask Congress to adopt now only the much less controversial Bank proposal, and then to attempt to reach an agreement with the British on the important points at present subject to such divergent interpretations. An agreement so arrived at could be sub- mitted to other nations for comments or suggestions. This would be a far wiser course than the Administration will pursue if it insists that Congress adopt the present Fund agreement blindly, without this essential clarifi- cation.