While the buyers by cash payments are concentrating the cotton necessary to fill their domestic or foreign orders, their need for funds is a pressing one. Their arrangements with local banks we have seen. When the cotton is shipped, the local bank, by means of drafts on the buyer’s head office, is relieved of the burden it has been carrying, but the cotton still represents capital, and if that capital is to continue to earn its wages it must be the basis for credit. The factors and large banks in New York or Boston, which have been assisting the local bank, must now assist the buyer and the warehouseman. The methods by which this burden is shifted to the larger banks are varied, and we can consider only one or two of their aspects.
Same Mills Pay Cash, Relieving
Factors of Burden
Some of the larger New England mills pay cash for the cotton which is shipped to them, buying sufficient in the season to carry them through, or nearly through, the year. Their buyers, therefore, need support, if they need it at all, only during the period of concentration. They may have their private banking arrangements, and may be able to utilize their warehouse receipts or bills of lading, or their mere notes based upon mixed collateral, for an advance of sixty to seventy-five per cent. of the value of the cotton, the line having been arranged in advance. Credit may be obtained by the buyer directly from the warehouseman, who thus becomes a factor in his own right, being supported by arrangements previously made with his own bank. Credit may also be obtained from a bank, upon bills of lading which are exchanged for warehouse receipts when the cotton is delivered at the port or at any warehousing point; or the credit obtained from the bank may be settled and a new credit opened with the warehouseman when the cotton is shifted from cars to storage.
Warehousemen as Factors of
Growing Importance
The growing importance of the warehouseman has been mentioned. His services have developed with the need of mills for greater credit, and their unwillingness to tie up their working capital in cotton held in their own warehouses. Mills which formerly bought all their year’s supply during the buying season, so-called, now take their cotton from warehouses as they want it, buying it from their buyers, and making payment according to the individual standing arrangements. The advent of the warehouseman who is either a banker, or closely affiliated with a bank, has undoubtedly done much to make the financing of cotton a more elastic and feasible proposition, distributing the risk over a wider circle and making credit more readily available at any point in the succession.
Weighing gin bales in a ginnery yard
