COINING SOVEREIGNS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIV, Issue 1186, 8 December 1924, Page 11

COINING SOVEREIGNS.

NOT FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC, When the gold standard is restored Australians may experience again the old-time thrill which used to run like a pleasant electric current along their lingers whenever they touched- —or, better still, clutched-—a sovereign (says the Sydney Sun). That happiness has been denied them for a period of nearly 10 years. Throughout that interval traders and the general public have managed to get along with an inconvertible paper currency, an achievement which economists used to say could not be continued without disaster. Sovereigns are still minted in Australia. A cartload of the coveted coins was delivered at the Commonwealth Bank ou a recent morning. It was an interesting event, in away; but it represented nothing out of the ordinary so far as either the bank or the mint was concerned. It did not foreshadow a return to the gold basis, and a consequent freedom of circulation of the gold pieces. The banks require a certain amount of gold as backing for deposits, etc., and the Commonwealth Bank needs, additionally, an amount to keep its reserve against notes up to the ratio required by the issuing authority. At the end of October the notes department of the. bank held for that purpose £‘24,442,587 10s—mostly in sovereigns and half-sovereigns. Now and again a tourist is able to obtain a few odd sovereigns; but the general public seldom sees one, and more seldom secures one. Its hope of direct participation in a distribution of the “parcel” delivered by the mint to the Commonwealth Bank is “small to disappearing point.”