WHY THE STRAIN IS GREAT.
In plain language, this simply means that in Australia i and in this country there has been during recent years much financing of inthistrial activities which, in their turn, have rested upon an uneconomic basis. It is as if an individual concern sought financial assistance from the banker in an enterprise which the banker saw was, in certain respects, conceived on unsound lines. In the individual case the banker would probably refuse - accommodation, and either the necessary adjustments would be effected, or the matter would be terminated by bankruptcy on the part of the firm. To-day, however, bankers are confronted with influences affecting not one particular firm but whole industries, and they have to deal with conditions not of their own making but which, among other things, impose a wholly unneces- sary strain upon lending resources, a strain out of all proportion to the actual volume of trade represented. A large turnover and quick results are the conditions alike conducive to full employment of a population, and to the safeguarding and proper restriction of banking loans, and it is just those conditions which restricted production, high prices, and imperfect organization have prevented from coming into being. The politicians and the trade unions, and not the bankers, have been masters of the situation, and, again in the words used by Sir Alfred Lewis in the course of his brief speech at the Bankers'. Institute, " it is the lot of bankers to unravel and disentangle the financial consequences of the War, so that their problems were never more difficult than they are to-day."
ARTHUR W. KIDDY.
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