If the banks stop discounting, a more or less violent readjustment with the outside world results. Business men who have obligations to meet, and most of them will belong to this class, are obliged to sell their goods and property at whatever prices are necessary and to stop purchasing entirely. The outcome, so far as the banks are concerned, is as above indicated. If conditions are such that sales at any price cannot be forced, a crisis ensues; that is, business operations are temporarily suspended and transfers of property in settlement of obligations are made through bankruptcy and other court proceedings. _7. Foreign Exchange_ The business relations between banks located in different countries do not differ in any essential respect from those between banks located in the same country. Interchange of checks, the conduct of checking accounts, shipments of cash, and borrowing and lending proceed in the same manner as between domestic institutions. The chief peculiarities of the foreign exchanges are due to the fact that different units of value and sometimes different standards must here be reckoned with, and that the precious metals, chiefly gold, are used in the settlement of balances. Drafts drawn in the United States on English points, for example, call for the payment of pounds sterling, those on French points for francs, and those on German points for marks, while all must be paid for in dollars. The translation of the language of values of one country into that of others thus involved requires the calculation of a so-called _par of exchange_. By this is meant the relation between the weights of pure metal contained in their respective units of value, if the countries in question have the same standard, and the relation between the market values of the metallic content of their units, if their standards are different. Thus the par of exchange between this country and England is $4.8665, since our dollar contains 23.22 grains of pure gold and the English pound sterling 4.8665 times as many grains, or 113.0016. Our par of exchange with France is 19.294 cents, the quotient of 4.4802, the number of grains of pure gold in the French franc, divided by 23.22. Between China and the United States the par of exchange is the market value in our dollars of the amount of silver contained in the tael, the Chinese unit.