The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
ten are sold over the counter for one sold on the floor. Evidence on
this point is not to be had in definite figures, of course, but I have
found no one in Wall Street who regards it as extravagant. A single big
bank in New York sold $550,000,000 in bonds in 1911--more than half the
recorded bond sales on the Stock Exchange.[274] I should not know how
to estimate the volume of outside dealings within many billions of
"probable error." If ten billions of listed bonds are sold over the
counter in New York alone, we may well suppose that the volume of
over-the-counter sales of listed and unlisted securities at least is not
smaller than the recorded sales on the floors of the exchanges. But this
is all guess work. There are no definite data.
For produce, cotton, and grain speculation we have, in general,
estimates rather than records. For the Board of Trade, in Chicago, there
is one quite striking piece of information. That is that the Federal War
Tax of 1 cent per hundred dollars on grain and provision futures on the
exchanges produced $2,000,000 in Chicago alone in 1915.[275] For the
purposes of the tax, deliveries within thirty days were counted, not as
futures, but as "spot" transactions. The tax was collected almost wholly
on grain. If the above figure is correct, then it is clear that dealings
in these futures of over thirty days aggregated 20 billions of dollars
worth. This gives no estimate of spot transactions, which are, however,
very great. All this trading involved less than 400,000,000 bushels of
grain received at Chicago--a little over a billion bushels were received
at all primary markets. The grain received at Chicago was, thus, (at
80 c. per bushel), sold sixty-two times over in these futures, and an
unknown number of times in spot transactions. There are further enormous
spot transactions in provisions of various kinds at Chicago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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