4 
What matters most to-day ms that interest policy is not 
autonomous nationally; the influence of outside financial 
powers, so much deplored by Keynes, is to-day formidable. 
Under present conditions capital streams are very difficult 
to control. The one country which could control them 
is the U.S. They could turn away capital in excess of what 
they need to finance their foreign balance deficit, as the 
Swiss have done formerly. 
I think that Salvati was quite right in his intervention 
when he observed that the international problems have 
not been given the role they deserve in the context of the 
problem of barriers to full employment. ( Perhaps this 
was due to the feeling that the balance of payments constraint 
is not crucial in Germany ). It is quite a different question 
however, whether one should conduct research in this direction. 
The competition in this field, from international organisations 
and personalities with long standing experience, is strong. 
One would enter this fray only on the basis of a very strong 
interest of a team of collaborators. 
The Guger-Walterskirchen paper suggests that studies on 
the finance of industry , based on the flow of funds data 
and on company balance sheets,, would be of very great interest. 
How has accumulation been financed? What did finance contribute 
to accumulation? We hear that banks on the European continent 
have contributed more than those in the U.S. and a fortiori 
more than in.Britain.* On the other hand high tec entrepreneurs 
* G.Nardozzi, Structural trends of financial systems and 
capital accumulation; France, Germany, Italy. Economic 
Papers, CEC No 14> May 1983.