Abstract

Must Banks Fail?

The article presents the information that five thousand banks have failed in the U.S. during the past nine years. Stockholders have lost $75,000. These "failure" have occurred chiefly in agricultural States of the U.S. More than 60 per cent of them were in villages, with a population of a thousand people or so. More than 60 per cent, probably 90 per cent, involved losses principally to farmers, country-town merchants and such persons of small means. On the Pacific Coast, where banking has become more highly organized, than elsewhere and on the Atlantic Coast, where banking, though less highly organized, is supported by greater capital accumulation in the general community, the number of bank failures has been, by comparison, almost negligible.