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Open-Market Policy and Totalitarian Control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

The reputation of a lady is seriously endangered if she ‘goes out’ to get a husband instead of waiting for one. Similarly, a bank is not supposed to run after the customers. During the nineteenth century when high standards of bank liquidity were generally accepted, and respectability was one of the essentials of banking success, waiting for the customer became a fundamental principle of banking practice, especially in Great Britain. Of course, ladies did not always live up to Victorian standards even in the Victorian Age; nor did banks, and since 1881 the Bank of England has gone out of its way on more than one occasion. But this was regarded as an irregular behavior, rarely acknowledged in public; the London market referred to the “hidden hand” whose transactions were not given statistical publicity. Since the War, many standards have changed; in 1922 the Federal Reserve System officially introduced the terms “open-market operations” and “open-market policy” which have since attained international circulation and the rank of major, if not fundamental, methods of monetary and credit management.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1939

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References

1 Cf. Commercial Banking Legislation and Control by Allen, A. M., Cope, S. R.Derk, J. H. and Witheridge, H. J. (London: Macmillan, 1938)Google Scholar.

2 Cf. Kindleberger, C. P., International Short-term Capital Movements (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937)Google Scholar.

3 3 No comprehensive study of open-market policies on an international scale seems to exist. The nearest attempt seems to be the rather superficial book of Kriz, M., Les Operations des Banques d' Emission sur le Marche Libre (Paris; Sirey, 1938)Google Scholar. Cf. also Hawtrey, R. G., The Art of Central Banking (London, 1932)Google Scholar.

4 Cf. Somary, T., Bankpolitik (Tübingen, 1927)Google Scholar and Viner, Y., Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York, 1937), pp. 206, 213, 257–61, 277. The term “open-market policy” is used by both in the customary loose fashionGoogle Scholar.

5 Cf. Beach, W. E., British International Gold Movements and Banking Policy, 1881–1913 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1935), Chap. VIIICrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Cf. Willis, H. P., The Federal Reserve System (New York, 1922), p. 30Google Scholar.

7 Cf. Hardy, C. O., Credit Policies of the Federal Reserve System (New York 1934)Google Scholar; Harris, S. E., Twenty Years of Federal Reserve Policy (Cambridge: Harvard, 1934)Google Scholar; Reed, H. L., Federal Reserve Policy, 1921–1930 (New York, 1930)Google Scholar; and especially, Whitney, C., Experiments in Credit Control (New York and London, 1934)Google Scholar.

8 Cf. Palyi, M., “Present Federal Reserve Policies,” in the Journal of Farm Economics (02, 1938), pp. 302 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Abbott, C. C., The New York Bond Market (Cambridge: Harvard, 1937), pp. 23, 94 ff.Google Scholar

10 Cf. Grebler, L., “Changing Conditions in World Capital Markets,” Harvard Business Review, Winter, 1937, p. 195Google Scholar; and Kiddy, A. W., “The Tendency Toward State Control,” Bankers Magazine (London), 05, 1938Google Scholar.

11 Sturzo, Don Luigi, Politics and Morality, (London, 1938) has emphasized this point with great forceGoogle Scholar.