The Feilding Star. SATURDAY, AUGUST, 20 1892. Banking in Australia

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 27, 20 August 1892, Page 2

The Feilding Star. SATURDAY, AUGUST, 20 1892. Banking in Australia

The recent disastrous banking failures in the neighbouring colonies have apparently taught leading financiers there some ex post facto wisdom. We learn from the Sydney Daily Telegraph the chairman of the Commercial Bank of Australia, speaking at the half-yearly meeting at Melbourne recently, made the announcement that the associated banks had resolved, in view of what had taken place lately in connection with the land boom in Victoria, and in a milder degree in Sydney, to give no encouragement iv future to excessive speculation. This is a wise determination, no doubt, but the speaker omitted to indicate when speculation crossed the line, and be came excessive. As our contemporary remarks, it is the duty of banking institutions to avoid, as far as possible, the risks of undue speculation in carrying on their business. The principal object of a bank is to act as a kind of financial conduit pipe by passing money from the man who wants to lend to the man who wants to borrow it, and to charge a toll for its service. When a banking institution stands behind a speculator either in land or shares, and " finances " him for the purpose of enabling him to gamble with the money which he borrows from the bank, that institution becomes a partner with him in his gambling transactions, and is as much i a speculator as he is. But a shrewd

>anker, as a rule, should confine himself to his legitimate business, and while minimising these risks throw the onus upon the outside public to do their speculations at their own peril, and with their owu money. The experiences of the last three or four years should have educated the principal bankers of the colonies to shun rash and illegitimate kinds of banking; and, if we may judge from the utterances of the chairman of the Commercial Bank of Australia at the Melbourne meeting, banking business in the Australian capitals will be conducted in future on sounder and safer and more legitimate principles khan it has been in a good many cases in recent years. This is not the only colony forming part of the Btitish Empire which is afflicted with the holiday nuisance, for we find that in New South Wales commercial men of recognised standing are beginning to lift up their voices against it. Holidays are sup posed to be needed for the healthful recreation of the jaded toilets for whom an occasional respite from labor is an acknowledged necessity, and therefore an observance well meriting the countenance of uuthority. But there are a number of holidays in the year which fail to meet their reputed purpose, and which are therefore not only useless, but mischievous. Instead of being a public benefit -they have developed into a serious public loss. The President of the Chamber of Commerce in Sydney, recently called attention to this matter and strongly condemned the existing custom of the indiscriminate appointment of public holiday's by the Government. In this, we are told by the Daily Telegraph, he only gave voice to the prevailing sentiment on the question. It is not the holidays which are now established fixtures that alone harass the community, un called for and unnecessary as the bulk of these are, but there are also other extra holidays proclaimed throughout the whole colony against which the commercial community have repeatedly but unavailingly protested. The frequency of notifications in the Gazette of holidays on all sorts of preposterous pretexts is a misuse of official power of which the business public have jaat cause of complaint. The whole system is wrong. That business should be either suspended or even inconvenienced by the appointment of a holiday because a race meeting is to be held in a particular place is absurd, nor is the proclamation of a holiday because of an agricultural show to be held many miles away one whit more defensible. Every word of this applies equally to New Zealand.