The War and Our Financial Fabric

What I call the Central loanable fund is the fund in what financial journalists call the Central Institution. This is not to be regarded as an institution standing in the centre of a great circle of banks, with directing chords, as it were, radiating from this governing centre. Why it is called the Central Institution I do not know, except it be a birth of the mother of invention, or a need arising out of the limitations of the English language.

But the origins are unimportant. The Bank of England, let us say, stands in an unique position, and it is a banking institution that possesses great, but not absolute, autocratic powers. The public attribute to it greater powers, and surround it with a greater glory and majesty than it probably possesses. This is a psychological fact of significance. It is the Bank _of England_. That is _the_ Bank; the Bank that props up the nation, and which the nation in its turn props up. It is a mutual propping up. The one cannot fall headlong and leave the other standing erect. Both must stand or fall together. As, however, in the consciousness of the community the nation is unshakable -- then it follows that the Bank of England is in the nation's view unshakable.