The Banks and the Stock Market

Autor: Harold Barger
Rok vydání: 1935
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Political Economy. 43:763-777
ISSN: 1537-534X
0022-3808
DOI: 10.1086/254853
Popis: H TAVE the Reserve banks, since the war, done everything for American business which, broadly speaking, could be expected of a banking system? The attainment of perfectly stable business conditions is not perhaps ever wholly within the power of monetary authorities, no matter how ably these institutions may be managed. Still less is this ideal attainable by a single national banking system; at any rate, if we have in mind a country which does much external trade. But the fluctuations in American business activity, even since the Reserve System was emancipated from war-time finance and its after-effects, have been very considerable. So considerable, indeed, and of such intensity have they been, that it is possible to hold a very restricted view as to what monetary management in general can achieve, and yet to wonder whether the existence of the Reserve banks might not have brought with it greater business stability than in fact it has done. In recent years criticisms of the past achievements of the Reserve System have followed in the main two separate and distinct lines of thought. On one side are those who argue that the System already possessed, at any rate after the conclusion of hostilities, all those powers which are necessary for the control of credit, and through credit of business conditions. If this view is justified, failure to achieve a greater measure of business stability must have been due either to mistaken policies on the part of the System itself, or (conceivably-though in post-war America, improbably) to limitations imposed upon the free choice of policy by the System, through considerations of an international character. On the opposite side are those who believe that the instruments of control in the possession of the System were inadequate-perhaps
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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