Page:Bankers and Credit (1924).pdf/61

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Deposits to the Other Deposits at the Bank of England, the banks would get back their cash at the Bank of England and would still hold their ten million Treasury Bills with an addition of ten millions to the deposits of their customers. This fresh ten millions will be an addition to the spending power of the community: the contractors who had received it would pay it out in wages to manual workers, in salaries to managers or in payment to merchants and producers for raw material. But at the same time there would be no corresponding increase in the goods to be bought, and so the outpouring of all this new money would merely mean filercer competition for an unaltered mass of goods, on the part of the purchasers with new money in their pockets and purchasers with the previously existing money. And the only possible result is a rise in the prices of the goods, which is to say a fall in the buying power of the money.

The fifth method, by which the Government neither borrows nor taxes but just prints notes and pays its debts with them, produces the same evil results as number four, and more so, because it creates not only new credit but new cash which can be used as a basis for yet more credit; but it also has the great advantage of