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tificate  issues  in  anticipation  of  the  Third  and
Fourth  Liberty  Loans  and  of  the  1918  and  1919  income ­
  and  excess  profits  taxes,  and  it  has  been  echoed
and  re-echoed  in  financial  journals  and  banking  publications. ­

The  need  for  some  equilibrating  device  in  the
money  market  during  the  period  of  our  war  financing ­
  has  obviously  been  great.  The  four  Liberty
Loans,  the  war  taxes  on  incomes  and  excess  profits
and  the  enormous  expansion  of  quasi-governmental
industries  have  involved  such  huge  and  such  abrupt
requisitions  upon  the  available  capital  and  credit  of
the  nation,  that  continuing  strain  and  recurrent  jar
—  verging  upon  dislocation  and  convulsion  —
would  seem  to  have  been  inevitable.
And  yet  as  indicated  by  the  general  experience  of
the  business  community  and  as  evidenced  by  the
actual  course  of  the  money  market  there  has  been
neither  business  derangement  nor  monetary  dislocation. ­
  Stringency  has  prevailed;  but  it  has  been
largely  of  a  kind  and  to  a  degree  at  first  sanctioned
and  subsequently  imposed  by  administrative  policy
with  a  view  to  the  conservation  of  credit,  the
restraint  of  non-essential  production,  and  the  prevention ­
  of  banking  over-expansion.
The  relative  number  of  business  failures  in  the
country  is  at  all  times  an  insufficient  index  of  monetary ­
  conditions,  and  this  inadequacy  is  very  much
more  pronounced  when  normal  business  tendencies
have  been  deflected  and  controlled  in  many  directions ­
  by  the  exigencies  of  war-time.  But  the  facts
as  to  a  lower  business  mortality  rate  during  the  per ­