[Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market by Walter Bagehot]@TWC D-Link book
Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market

CHAPTER VIII
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All the present directors, including the Governor and Deputy-Governor, are engaged in their own business, and it is very possible, indeed it must perpetually have happened, that their own business as merchants most occupied the minds of most of them just when it was most important that the business of the Bank should occupy them.

It is at a panic and just before a panic that the business of the Bank is most exacting and most engrossing.

But just at that time the business of most merchants must be unusually occupying and may be exceedingly critical.

By the present constitution of the Bank, the attention of its sole rulers is most apt to be diverted from the Bank's affairs just when those affairs require that attention the most.

And the only remedy is the appointment of a permanent and influential man, who will have no business save that of the Bank, and who therefore presumably will attend most to it at the critical instant when attention is most required.


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