AN INDEPENDENT BANK.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20190, 5 July 1928, Page 6

AN INDEPENDENT BANK.

'J'HE BUSINESS COMMUNITY of the Dominion will doubtless welcome gladly the advent of a new and independent bank, which, it is reported, will shortly be given legislative authority to operate. This concern will have a capital of £2,000,000, of which £1,000,000 is to be subscribed before the issue of the charter, and a Bill to provide for its incorporation is to be introduced to the House of Representatives next week by Mr J. Gordon Elliot, the Member for Orona. Especially will the new bank be welcomed because a condition of its articles of association is that it will not become a member of the associated banking group that has for so long had the country by the throat. To what extent production, manufacture and business generally have been retarded in the last few years by the .high rates of interest on overdrafts demanded by the existing banks cannot easily be estimated. At the annual meeting of the Bank of New Zealand recently, the chairman, Sir George Elliot, while sounding a most optimistic note as to the country’s future prosperity, notified that the bank rates would not be lowered for a little while longer. We shall see for how much longer high rates of interest are maintained when a new bank restores to a relieved community the blessing of long-lost competition.