Social Comptabilism: The Cheque and Clearing Service in the Austrian Postal Savings Bank. Proposed Law laid before the Chamber of Representatives of BelgiumSolvay, Ernest
General
Social Comptabilism: The Cheque and Clearing Service in the Austrian Postal Savings Bank. Proposed Law laid before the Chamber of Representatives of Belgium
Solvay, Ernest
Postal savings banks; Postal savings banks -- Austria
But it is necessary to attain a still higher degree of organisation
taking the Savings Bank itself as the foundation on which to rest.
The point aimed at is how to place at the disposal of its depositors a
regular and continuous service of account-keeping both individual and
collective in character, and to co-ordinate in a permanent manner all
the operations which it embraces; the point aimed at is how to assure
to every depositor the power of causing regular collections to be
made by the mediation of the Savings Bank and the post offices, the
amount being carried to his or her account; the point aimed at, is how
to effect these payments by the same intermediaries without running
the slightest risk, without the least of these operations escaping an
inflexible account-keeping, constantly kept before the depositor's
eyes, and without there being any need for the depositors themselves
directly and personally to handle the funds.
The centralization of the accounts of all the adherents makes it
possible for the Savings Bank to obtain clear and definite results and
to eliminate by means of the clearing of accounts the intermediary of
money in an ever increasing number of transactions, for this service is
by its natural evolution, by the rapid increase of the number of the
adherents destined to preponderate.
Assuredly, the instruments of credit and of liquidation, of clearing
and balancing, which more and more reduce the use of money, have in
Belgium taken an already great importance at the National Bank, in
the private banks, and in the Unions de Credit:--the credit given
and received having, in a quarter of a century attained two thousand
millions of francs at the National Bank alone;--the extent of the
movement being shown by the large figures of the current accounts
upon which it operates, and during the last three years the National
Bank has sought to connect by a sort of clearing the other credit
institutions.
But who can hide the fact that we have yet much progress to make, or
how far we are behind certain nations such as England. We may judge of
it by the collected statistics given very lately by M. Des Essarts in
the Annals of the Statistical Society of Paris. The point to aim at is
to make the more perfect means of liquidation penetrate more thoroughly
into new soil and of bringing them into closer connection with the
social organism. This is precisely the project now laid before the
Chamber, by which it is proposed for this end to have recourse to an
institution like the Savings Bank, the deposits in which rise to more
than 450 millions of francs and are distributed in more than 1 million
100,000 bankbooks, and which has seen these deposits increase, in five
years, more than 100 millions; and to bring this institution to help
to accelerate the general evolution of the community in the fruitful
direction of the gradual economising of the monetary instrument and its
final elimination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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