THE DEMAND FOR CURRENCY ”* 
decreased demand for houses without finding any 
alteration in the number or size of houses. 
The effect of misguided speculation for the rise or 
fall of the value of a currency is disguised, so far as 
internal speculation is concerned, by taking the 
form, in each individual case, of speculation for the 
fall or rise of particular commodities. Very few 
persons grasp the idea of a rise and fall in the value 
of their own country’s money, and the Money Market 
is a place where you deal in loans, not in money. 
We have not yet risen to the height of having a 
Currency Market in which we can buy and sell 
future Board of Trade, Statist and other Index 
Numbers. But direct speculation in the currency 
of other countries is common enough, and is often 
ill-informed enough to cause great disturbances of 
values, instead of smoothing them down. Soon 
after the war, the editor of an Athens journal was 
unable to go to a certain restaurant there because 
the waiters worried him with questions about the 
future of Austrian crowns which they were holding. 
When the British troops first went to Cologne, they 
bought German marks because they saw that the 
mark was ‘lower than usual.” It is known that 
many milliards of the depreciated currencies are 
held by foreigners. Such holding is, of course, a 
pure addition to the usual demand for currency, and 
tends to maintain its value for a time. Eventually, 
however, the foreign holders decide to sell, and their 
decision is much more likely to come at a time when 
it will make a fall more precipitous than when it 
will moderate a rise. This ignorant speculation of 
foreigners has been the cause of many violent fluctua- 
tions of currency values and is a great support of 
the doctrine that they ‘depend on confidence.” 
About that we need not say more than that the price 
of sugar also is affected at any moment by people’s