490 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
debt, partially historic and partly current, for its services in
distributing their own bank stocks and rendering them, like
other corporate securities, readily purchasable and salable.
Services to the Organized Commodity Markets.—Still
another class of business institutions to which the New York
Stock Exchange is of no small benefit includes the other or-
ganized markets of the country, not only the great commodity
exchanges but also the smaller stock exchanges in various parts
of the country. Many members of the national New York
Stock Exchange are also members of the comparatively local
stock exchanges of Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other
American cities,*® and are often able to extend credit to pur-
chasers of local securities listed there by hypothecating at the
banks securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The
same advantage also exists in the case of firms which are mem-
bers of the New York Stock Exchange and also of the Chicago
Board of Trade, the New York Cotton Exchange, and other
commodity exchanges. During past periods of liquidation or
credit shortage many a purchase of cotton or wheat made on
credit has depended upon collateral loans obtained on securities
listed on the Exchange. In this indirect but significant way
the Stock Exchange, by keeping its many billion dollars’ worth
of listed securities readily negotiable, is a bulwark of strength
to the conditions of credit which underlie the business of the
entire nation.
The Value of Stock Exchanges to Modern Government.—
Finally, organized security markets are essential today to the
operation of our machinery of government. We so often for-
get that governments have in the long run, like corporations
or individuals, to strike a balance between expenditure and
income, and to make the amount of the one dependent upon the
actual or potential amount of the other. The proudest govern-
ment that ever existed cannot flout the immutable and eternal
laws of economics and continue to exist. To only a limited
"15 See Chapter XV, p. 435, and Appendix IVe.
