INTERNATIONAL CLEARING HOUSE PROPOSED
Business to-day is really the great organized life of the world. The agencies through which it is carried forward have created such a maze of interrelations that each nation must depend on all the others. A great Chicago banker, John J. Arnold, Vice-President of the First National Bank of that city, said to me this week that so closely drawn and interwoven had become the economic net in which the world was immeshed that if the great war could have been postponed four or five years it would never have swept down upon men like a thunderbolt of destruction. As an additional strand of great strength in the warp and woof of modern progress, Mr. Arnold believes that an International Clearing House will come—in fact that it is an inevitable development in international finance. It was my privilege to hear him make a notable address before the last meeting of the American Investment Bankers’ Association in Philadelphia in which he proposed such a Clearing House for settling balances between nations, just as our modern Clearing Houses now settle balances between Banks in cities in which they are located. Beyond question such an International Clearing House, when established, would quickly become an invaluable auxiliary to a World Court, helping to give it stability and serving, when occasion arose, as a mighty agency through which economic pressure could be applied.
And I believe Mr. Arnold is right in his view that an International Clearing House is bound to come. Business, finance and commerce are now so truly international that there is a manifest need of it. As a strong proof of this let me remind you that when this war broke, forty per cent. of the securities of the world were held internationally.