[Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market by Walter Bagehot]@TWC D-Link bookLombard Street: A Description of the Money Market CHAPTER III 12/36
As soon as bills of exchange are given upon a large scale, this remittance is a very pressing requirement.
Such bills must be made payable at a place convenient to the seller of the goods in payment of which they are given, perhaps at the great town where his warehouse is.
But this may be very far from the retail shop of the buyer who bought those goods to sell them again in the country.
For these, and a multitude of purposes, the instant and regular remittance of money is an early necessity of growing trade; and that remittance it was a first object of early banks to accomplish. These are all uses other than those of deposit banking which banks supplied that afterwards became in our English sense deposit banks. By supplying these uses, they gained the credit that afterwards enabled them to gain a living as deposit banks.
Being trusted for one purpose, they came to be trusted for a purpose quite different, ultimately far more important, though at first less keenly pressing. But these wants only affect a few persons, and therefore bring the bank under the notice of a few only.
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