The Eastern Economist April 7 1944

The choice of the head of the Imperial Bank is not a matter merely of the choice of the head of any ordinary joint stock bank. [...] On the contrary the role of the Reserve Bank's agent which has been allotted to the Imperial Bank where the former has no branches of its own as well as the removal of restrictions on the commercial banking activities of the Imperial Bank has emphasized its predominance. [...] The using up of savings and material rsources during the war in the industrial field the new processes developed during the war in the fields of nutrition and health the nature and pace of recostruction work in occupied countries the need to renovate colonial economic policy with a shift of emphasis on the betterment of the population instead of the mere exploitation of natural resources [...] In the case of the woollen knitting industry the bottleneck was to be found in three factors: (1) the unsuitability of the knitting machines in most of the factories for the production of goods up to Army specifications; (2) the difficulty in obtaining knitting needles; and (3) the shortage of worsted yarn. [...] At the beginning of World War I and again at the beginning of World War II the reserves of the banking system of the United States and espcially of the Federal Reserve banks were such as to permit a great increase of checking accounts.