In June, July, and August, for example, conditions may warrant a hope of bountiful harvests, while general business is dull and idle money abundant. Such a prospect is always discounted, other things being equal, by a rise in securities, and money that is not yet required to market the crops thus finds employment as loans on Stock Exchange collateral. Later on, when reviving business leads the interior banks to call their New York balances, the depository banks meet the demand by calling loans and by advancing rates. The speculative movement on ’Change is then checked or reversed just in proportion to the demand for money elsewhere. It may continue for a while if the discounting process has not been complete, or if there remains a wide disparity between interest rates for money and net returns on securities; or if the independent resources of the city banks are large enough to furnish comfortable interest rates even after the westward drain has commenced, but, generally speaking, “the move is over,” to quote the vernacular, by the time business men want their money. Nine times out of ten any monetary strain that results thereafter is not due to speculative operations in securities nor to any other cause attributable to the Stock Exchange. A word should be said here concerning the Stock Exchange Clearing House, because just as the Clearing House of the associated banks ascertains and pays the balances of its members with a minimum outlay of coin and legal tender notes and with great economy of time and labor, so the Stock Exchange Clearing House stands the strain of an enormous business, reduces the volume of checks and deliveries, and relieves both the banks and the stockbrokers of an amount of risk and confusion that would be well-nigh intolerable. In order that the layman, for whom these pages are written, may understand what this means, it may be said that if 500,000 shares of stock are sold in a day on the Stock Exchange, and if we assume the average price of these stocks to be 50, the checks paid out on that day would be $25,000,000, and in a year at that rate certifications would be necessary involving the stupendous total of $7,500,000,000. This clumsy if not impossible method the Clearing House was designed to avoid. Moreover, the actual daily transfer of such a volume of securities is largely obviated by the Clearing House system, and thus another and highly important economy is effected.