MR. MANUFACTURER: Then when you think of it, what a stupendous piece of folly it is, to have all this gold floating around the country, doing no possible good, when a piece of credit paper, or bank note, would do the work just as well.
MR. LABORINGMAN: Anybody can see that. A man that can't ought to be arrested for want of brains. He'd have to plead guilty. Putting that gold that you need in your bank reserves at the rate of one dollar of gold for five or six dollars of credit into the streets, cotton fields, corn fields and in the mines, is no greater piece of folly than it would be to send a six-horse team to haul Mr. Farmer home, when one horse would do just as well.
UNCLE SAM: Mr. Laboringman has got this thing dead right. In fact, in my judgment, he has the horse sense of this crowd. Give him a show, I'll bet on him every time, he always takes a short cut, and hits the nail square on the head.
MR. MERCHANT: Suppose, Mr. Banker, that all the banks of the country should come into the National system, and put up, say 10 per cent, as you suggested a while ago, of their demand or individual deposits, and 5 per cent of their savings deposits, what would your central gold reserve amount to?
MR. BANKER: On June 14, 1912, the Comptroller of the Currency reported that the individual deposits amounted to ten billion five hundred million ($10,500,000,000), and that the savings deposits, outside of the mutual savings bank, amounted to two billion eight hundred and seventy-two million ($2,872,000,000).
If the State Banks and Trust Companies should become National Banks, and bring their reserves up to the National standard, by exchanging their notes for gold; that is, exchanging $468,000,000 of their notes for that much gold, the result would be as follows:
Individual Deposits $10,500,000,000 @10% $1,050,000,000 Savings Deposits 2,872,000,000 @ 5% 143,600,000 Bank Notes 1,219,000,000 @10% 121,900,000 -------------- Making a total central gold reserve of $1,315,500,000
This is just double what the gold reserve of France is, the largest gold reserve in the world today, but when you consider the fact that our banking resources are 45 per cent of the total banking resources of the world, it should be even more than that. It is interesting to note that in making this readjustment for a central gold reserve it would be just $100,000,000 larger than our bank note circulation.