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Show n - - " ' T We Live On Credit Credit keeps the wheels of commerce and industry turning. Relatively few business transactions involve the immediate use of caiih. When you make a tele-phone call, when you purchase a new-car, new-car, when you order tonight's groceries, as a rule you defer payment pay-ment until some future day. And the telephone company and the automobile dealer and the grocer also live by credit when they buy from wholesalers and manufacturers it is agreed that payment will be made, not at the time of delivery, but 30, 60 or 90 days honce. Some 90 per cent of all business transactions in this country re-Quire re-Quire the uso of credit. In only 10 per cent in "cash on the barrelhead" barrel-head" involved. A very large part of all credit is provided, of course, by banks. And when the banker loans you a thousand dollars be is doing precisely pre-cisely what the grocer does when he trusts you for your ten dollars' worth of food until pay day. On top of that, the banker is bound by rigid rules designed to protpct his depositors from loss. It is his Job to analyze your past credit record, your abilities, your character chara-cter and your prospects. And if it appears that you will be able to repay tjio loan as contracted, the money is yours. If it appears you will be unable to, he must decline the loan, irrespective of his personal per-sonal feelings. His obligation to his depositors who own the money, plus the strictures of the unrelenting banking laws, leave him no other course. Without bank credit our economy and industrial structure, as we know it, would collapse. Bank credit was far more of a factor than most of us realize in the astonishing commercial and geographical geographi-cal development of this nation. And in the future, as in the past), bank credit, extended by a publicly-regulated, privately-owned banking industry, will continue to be a vital progressive factor. . . 1 |