Readings in Money and Banking: Selected and AdaptedPhillips, Chester Arthur
General
Readings in Money and Banking: Selected and Adapted
Phillips, Chester Arthur
Banks and banking; Banks and banking -- United States; Money
(11) It has no sympathies or antipathies and no politics.
(12) It can be relied upon to act up to its instructions.
(13) It does not resign.
(14) All new investments of value suitable for trust estates
are offered in the first instance to trust companies, and in
that way it has a choice of valuable security; and as its
purchases are on a scale of magnitude, it can usually buy at
a rate which is lower than that at which the individual
trustee can purchase.
The most common objection to the appointment of corporate trustees is
thus stated by Augustus Peabody Loring, Esq.:
The trust companies, which have of late years become so
numerous, to a considerable extent do away with the element
of personal risk attaching to an individual trustee; but
they lack the advantages of personal management. These
companies sometimes fail from improper management as utterly
as individuals do, and as a rule the lack of personal
management results in securing the minimum return only on
the amount invested, and lacks the great advantages often
secured by the able personal oversight of individual
trustees.
The question, after all, comes back to the personal qualifications of
corporate officers and individuals. If the former are less capable than
the latter, the fault is with the particular company--not the system,
and if interest returns are sometimes less under corporate management,
this fact is more than equalized by the added safety to the corpus of
the estate.
A "Trustee Company" has been suggested as a proper title for the company
doing a legitimate trust business, and is the name used in Australia and
in New Zealand. In some states the use of the word "trust" in corporate
titles is now regulated by law. Confusion has arisen in the popular mind
between the trust company and the trusts or industrial combinations.
The usual functions of a trust company are: banking in a more or less
limited form, execution of corporate trusts, execution of individual
trusts, care of securities and valuables. In addition, other functions
are sometimes exercised, such as life, title, and fidelity insurance,
and the business of becoming surety. The earlier companies in the United
States were chartered to manage individual estates only and to act in
certain fiduciary capacities; the recent development of the trust
company has been in the direction of banking functions and corporate
trust business.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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