(5 of 5)
3) All banks should allow free access to safety deposit boxes so hoarders could bring their hoardings back to light.
4) All Postal Savings banks should stay open.
5) All banks might cash checks drawn on the Treasurer of the U. S.
6) All banks should be allowed to receive payments due them.
7) In the exercise of all these privileges no bank should pay out gold coin or gold certificates. The nation's gold supply must be conserved.
But this last rule was soon modified by permitting banks to pay out currency (not gold) for payrolls, medicine, the necessities of life. Many a bank was doing business on this basis Tuesday.
National Scrip? But bankers still puzzled over their main problem: how to set the wheels of finance turning. Many of them turned to scrip thoughts. Chicago and a hundred other cities made tentative plans to issue it. There was talk of a national scrip to make nation-wide trade possible, but Secretary Woodin and Banker Davison, the 1907 veteran, opposed this. Main things, and main causes of delay, were 1) to get enough scrip printed. 2) to make the scrip of various cities interchangeable and 3) possibility that scrip could be avoided.
Bottom. Conservative economists look-ing back on last week's events called them the greatest debacle in banking history: the spectacle of a nation with $4,344,000,000 in gold ($2,892,000,000 of it held by the Federal Reserve System) watching powerless while its entire banking system disintegrated state by state. They also drew a moral: that the futile attempt of the nation to convert its $42,000,000,000 of bank deposits into currency sprang from the fact that a few unsound banks which should have been liquidated had instead been nursed along till public confidence was impaired. Finally, the situation gave them hope: Now the banking system of the country must clean house— sweep out its weaker members before reopening, thereby ending an unsound banking situation that has hung over the conn try retarding business recovery. Said Secretary Woodin: "I think we're on the bottom and can't go any lower."
Guaranty. Preparing for record-quick-acting session of Congress, Speaker Rainey forecast some sort of Govern-ment guaranty of bank deposits. Prob-lem : to make guaranty effective for good banks only.
*Which he himself remembered, had looked up.