The war and our financial fabric

The work gathers lessons from a major financial crisis and examines banking, credit, and currency problems revealed by wartime strain. It argues that banks do not create credit but convert existing wealth into liquid capital, enabling circulation and preventing economic stagnation. The author analyses reserve ratios and contends that both private banks and the central bank cannot simultaneously maintain high gold proportions without collectively ceasing to lend, making rigid reserve rules impractical. He recommends an elastic legal-tender mechanism and segregation of deposits into pure deposits and loan-deposits to clarify reserve responsibilities and reduce harmful hoarding, and stresses that panics are psychological rather than mathematical phenomena.