Lombard Street: A Description of the Money MarketBagehot, Walter
History
Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market
Bagehot, Walter
Banks and banking -- England -- London; Banks and banking -- Great Britain; Finance -- England -- London; Finance -- Great Britain
The permanent Governor ought to give his whole time to the business
of the Bank. He ought to be forbidden to engage in any other
concern. All the present directors, including the Governor and
Deputy-Governor, are engaged in their own business, and it is very
possible, indeed it must perpetually have happened, that their own
business as merchants most occupied the minds of most of them just
when it was most important that the business of the Bank should
occupy them. It is at a panic and just before a panic that the
business of the Bank is most exacting and most engrossing. But just
at that time the business of most merchants must be unusually
occupying and may be exceedingly critical. By the present
constitution of the Bank, the attention of its sole rulers is most
apt to be diverted from the Bank's affairs just when those affairs
require that attention the most. And the only remedy is the
appointment of a permanent and influential man, who will have no
business save that of the Bank, and who therefore presumably will
attend most to it at the critical instant when attention is most
required. His mind, at any rate, will in a panic be free from
pecuniary anxiety, whereas many, if not all, of the present
directors must be incessantly thinking of their own affairs and
unable to banish them from their minds.
The permanent Deputy-Governor must be a director and a man of fair
position. He must not have to say 'Sir' to the Governor. There is no
fair argument between an inferior who has to exhibit respect and a
superior who has to receive respect. The superior can always, and
does mostly, refute the bad arguments of his inferior; but the
inferior rarely ventures to try to refute the bad arguments of his
superior. And he still more rarely states his case effectually; he
pauses, hesitates, does not use the best word or the most apt
illustration, perhaps he uses a faulty illustration or a wrong word,
and so fails because the superior immediately exposes him. Important
business can only be sufficiently discussed by persons who can say
very much what they like very much as they like to one another. The
thought of the speaker should come out as it was in his mind, and
not be hidden in respectful expressions or enfeebled by affected
doubt. What is wanted at the Bank is not a new clerk to the
directors--they have excellent clerks of great experience now--but a
permanent equal to the directors, who shall be able to discuss on
equal terms with them the business of the Bank, and have this
advantage over them in discussion, that he has no other business
than that of the Bank to think of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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