Seventeen Talks on the Banking Question: Between Uncle Sam and Mr. Farmer, Mr. Banker, Mr. Lawyer, Mr. Laboringman, Mr. Merchant, Mr. ManufacturerFowler, Charles N. (Charles Newell)
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Seventeen Talks on the Banking Question: Between Uncle Sam and Mr. Farmer, Mr. Banker, Mr. Lawyer, Mr. Laboringman, Mr. Merchant, Mr. Manufacturer
Fowler, Charles N. (Charles Newell)
Banks and banking -- United States; Currency question -- United States
MR. MANUFACTURER: There is nothing so essential to relieve the constant
strain upon individual credit and mobilize the really liquid wealth
of the country, as the creation of the kind of paper you have just
described. Think of it for a moment; there are the goods in transit,
the shipper, the buyer and the banker back of the paper that will be
coming due within the next sixty or ninety days. You can hardly imagine
anything safer, and more quickly convertible into cash.
Money available for the purchase of such paper would come from many
sources, among them the following:
_First_: Corporations would immediately be organized to deal in such
paper.
_Second_: All strong business houses, merchants and manufacturers would
prefer to hold such paper instead of stocks or bonds, for their surplus
funds during their slack seasons.
_Third_: Bankers of all classes, both in the country and city, would
find such paper preferable to any other form of investment for a
secondary reserve, and for their surplus funds during slack periods in
their respective sections.
_Fourth_: If acceptances are limited as they should be to goods in
transit, or on the road to consumption, the adoption of this principle
will mark, indeed will accentuate, the strong, the fundamental
difference between liquid assets and the more fixed forms of
investment, such as bonds and stocks. Banking capital employed in
this way can far more readily adjust itself to the exigent demands of
liquidation in the case of a panic, or a commercial crisis.
_Fifth_: Undoubtedly, to a very large degree, foreign capital would be
attracted to our market for this kind of paper, because its strength
and liquidity has already been proved to the bankers and capitalists on
the other side of the Atlantic. And whenever capital was required, the
rate of interest would be such as to be inviting. In other words, the
rates of interest would rise, correspondingly with our needs, and the
entire commercial world would be our possible market for the commercial
paper representing the economic title to the five or six billions
of finished goods that are always passing from the producer to the
consumers in this country, and to the consumers abroad.
MR. BANKER: Undoubtedly, we should soon have right here a general
market to take care of all this kind of paper; and it ought to become
soon the strongest and broadest market in the world for this kind of an
investment, considering our vast commercial resources. All of our Bills
of Exchange would be drawn in dollars, not francs, marks or pounds
sterling, and we would put upon them the stamp of the eagle, and not
the lion and the unicorn.
UNCLE SAM: I like that. It stirs my blood, warms the cockles of my
American heart. That's business.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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