BANKS.
The Investment Market.—Marketable securities include those dealt in on the investment market or stock exchange, that is to say stocks and shares, debentures and bonds, etc. Securities of these kinds are not all marketable. The less well known cannot be sold in the open market at all, or, if they can, it may be only after delay in finding a buyer and with a substantial sacrifice of price. But the securities which really are marketable form under normal conditions a liquid investment. Occasionally it may hap pen that the investment market breaks down ; demand fails, and the market cannot be made to absorb even first rate securities except at a relatively very low price. Here, as in the case of a breakdown of the discount market, it is possible for the central bank to relieve the strain ; it can offer to lend to the other banks on stock exchange securities. But central banks are usually less willing to make this bind of loan than to rediscount bills. Bills have both forms of liquidity, being both short-dated and market able. Stock exchange securities are only marketable. If the capital sums they represent are repayable at all it is only at a distant date.