British War Finance, 1914-15 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE STOCK EXCHANGES CLOSED The average newspaper reader is probably of opinion that the Stock Exchange was the least successful of our financial institutions in bearing the war strain. The fact of its having been suddenly closed several days before war was actually declared, while the bill market, with the help of the Treasury and the Bank of England, professed to carry on business as usual, would seem to warrant such an inference. The prolonged interregnum which followed, with its emergency regulations and special settlements, might tend to confirm it. The severity of the restrictions under which the House was at last allowed to reopen could leave no doubt on the subject. The Stock Exchange was made the scapegoat of more powerful and higher-placed offenders. It had sins enough of its own to answer for, doubtless, but the worst of them affected a small minority of its members. Of its five thousand members, 90 per cent. were either brokers with a small circle of clients or jobbers doing a moderate amount of business, and keeping within their means. The other 10 per cent. was made up of plungers, promoters, market riggers, coolie brokers, and touts of various kinds for outside houses. It was in this small but influential crowd that the danger arose which frightened the Committee into closing the House at five minutes' notice. After hours on July 30 forty large firms are said to have notified the Stock Exchange Committee that if the House reopened they would have to hammer themselves. The largest of them were in the international market, and had incurred heavy liabilities on behalf of foreign firmswho could not or would not remit. Others were option dealers who had been badly caught in the frightful slump in prices precipitated by the war scare. Others had bee...