out of somebody's pocket, and for the banks because, except when the securities that they took were Treasury Bills or other investments with an early date of maturity, they were "locked up." When they subscribed to War Loans, as they were urged if not practically forced to do in the case of the earlier issues, they took over assets that they would not for patriotic reasons be able to dispose of as readily as they would wish, when the time came for them to return, after the war, to their real business of financing the requirements of trade. By lending to their customers to enable them to subscribe, they also got a more or less frozen security, because investors who had been stimulated to borrow from their banks in order to subscribe to War Loans could not well be pressed very hard to pay the loans off. If they were obliged to do so and had to throw stocks they had purchased upon the market in order to redeem the loans, the effect upon the market for Government securities and therefore upon bank balance sheets would not have been comfortable.
The question of the increase in the banks' holding of cash and money at call and short notice brings us to the currency expansion which was required to support this jerry-built addition to the fabric of credit. As was shown
