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
4. Freights and insurance are responsible for a fourth important source
of demand for foreign exchange. A walk along William Street in New York
is all that is necessary to give a good idea of the number and
importance of the foreign companies doing business in the United States.
In some form or other all the premiums paid have to be sent to the other
side. Times come, of course, like the year of the Baltimore fire, when
losses by these foreign companies greatly outbalance premiums received,
the business they do thus resulting in the actual creation of great
amounts of foreign exchange, but in the long run--year in, year out--the
remitting abroad of the premiums earned means a steady demand for
exchange.
With freights it is the same proposition, except that the proportion of
American shipping business done by foreign companies is much greater
than the proportion of insurance business done by foreign companies. An
estimate that the yearly freight bill amounts to $150,000,000 is
probably not too high. That means that in the course of every year there
is a demand for that amount of exchange with which to remit back what
has been earned from us.
5. Tourists' expenditures abroad are responsible for a further heavy
demand for exchange. The sums spent by American tourists in foreign
lands annually aggregate a very large amount--possibly as much as
$175,000,000--all of which has eventually to be covered by remittances
of exchange from this side.
Then again there must be considered the expenditures of wealthy
Americans who either live abroad entirely or else spend a large part of
their time on the other side. By these expatriates money is spent
extremely freely, their drafts on London and Paris requiring the
frequent replenishment, by remittances of exchange from this side, of
their bank balances at those points. Furthermore, there must be
considered the great amounts of American capital transferred abroad by
the marriage of wealthy American women with titled foreigners. Such
alliances mean not only the transfer of large amounts of capital _en
bloc_, but mean as well, usually, an annual remittance of a very large
sum of money. No account of the money drained out of the country in this
way is kept, of course, but it is an item which certainly runs up into
the tens of millions.
6. Lastly, there is the demand for exchange originating from the paying
off of the short-term loans which European bankers so continuously make
in the American market.
These loaning operations, it must be understood, both originate exchange
and create a demand for it. They were mentioned as one of the sources
from which exchange originates, and now as one of the sources from
which, during the course of every year, springs a demand for a very
great quantity of exchange.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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