ABSTRACT
At this advanced stage of the investigation of the Evolution of the Money Market, a brief retrospect will be salutary and invigorating. We began about the year 1385 with the embryology of finance, scrutinising the early beginnings of the various factors and functions which make up the financial organism as we know it to-day. We noted the gradual increase of specialisation and differentiation of the functions, resulting in the steadily enhanced complexity essential to ultimate advanced development, under the control of a central co-ordinating force. We watched the first vague awakening of the self-consciousness of finance when the establishment of the Bank of England brought into being the possibility of a continuity of tradition, and an unbroken accumulation of experience, simultaneously surrounding itself with prestige and ultimately gaining some measure of predominance. But before this could be established the sinister interposition of incoherence, isolation, and lack of discipline manifested itself in the establishment, practically at random, of innumerable so-called “banks,” working without system and drifting by the score into the maelstrom of insolvency.
