Viscount Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, has expressed this new spirit :
The law is not to be compared to a veritable antique to be taken down,
dusted, admired and put back on the shelf; rather it is like an old but
still vigorous tree-firmly rooted in history ; but still putting out new
shoots, taking new grafts and from time to time dropping dead wood.
That process has been going on, is going on now and will continue.
After all, law is not an end in itself. It is a means whereby the State
can develop and regulate in an orderly and just manner the social system which it desires. It follows that, as the social problems of the day
are constantly changing, the law must adapt itself to meet them.267
267. Kilmuir, The State, The Citizm and The Law, 73 L.Q. REv. 172, 173 (1957).
Another glaring omission from the present British legislation is the absence of any provision equivalent to section eight of the Clayton Act,230 although the practice of interlocking directorates is very common in the United
Kingdom. Through the five major comp1ercial banks, many leading industrial
concerns are related; and frequently several firms in the same industry will
have common directors.231 It has been calculated, for instance, that when the
steel industry was nationalized in 1951 all its major firms were linked through
the board of the Westminster Bank.232
232. AARONOVITCH, MoNOPOLY, A STUDY OF BRITISH MoNoPOLY CoMPETITION 32
(1955).
Finally, there seems to be little rationality in limiting the operation of the
requirement of registration to agreements relating to goods. The American
antitrust laws have found no serious difficulty in adapting themselves to the
problem of agreements relating to services.233 No doubt the real objection
which the government felt in 1956 to making any such extension was that it
might encompass the activities of trade unions, but it should not be impossible
to draft legislation designed to secure the registration of restrictive agreements
in services provided by business, while excluding workmen’s agreements.
- See, e.g., Transamerica Corp. v. Board of Governors, 206 F.2d 163 (3d Cir. 1953)
(banking); United States v. Morgan, 118 F. Supp. 621 (S.D.N.Y. 1953) (investment
banking); Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945) (news); Times-Picayune
Publishing Co. v. United States, 345 U.S. 594 (1953) (advertising); United States v.
Joint Traffic Ass’n, 171 U.S. 505 (1898) (railway services); Radovich v. National Football League, 352 U.S. 445 (1957) (professional football).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Morgan_(1953)
Judgment
The case, which was brought to trial in the Southern District of New York in 1952 was presided over by the controversial and politically conservative Federal judge Harold Medina, who had become internationally infamous for his rulings in the 1949 Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders.[6] In October 1953, after a year-long trial, Medina found in favor of the investment banking firms. In his judgment, he saw “a constantly changing panorama of competition among the seventeen defendant firms.”
the pipeline opening up Germany for direct Russian gas deliveries, has been a bone in the throat of the Americans for years now. But gas prices have been exploding here in Europe. Pensioners here in Holland, people with a thousand a month, now pay more than €300 to heat a small apartment. A grim reminder of how it ended for the Soviet pensioners post ’89, and a shade of things to come. We need Nord Stream 2 to open up, that will at least bring prices down somewhat, although things are never going to be the same again.
German frustration with America’s mayhem in the Ukraine go back to when it started: Maidan 2014. That’s when the Neo-Cons and the CIA invaded Kiev, in an effort to wrest Sevastopol from the Russian Empire, and thus their base for European power projection. They failed. Putin took the Crimea, and the Donbass as a buffer and bargaining chip.
The resulting sanctions on Russia have cost the German economy dearly, they have hundreds of billions invested in Eastern Europe. Even much more importantly: the Germans have no desire whatsoever to end up as the battlefield for a Russo-American showdown.
English Origins
Synopsis: The origins ofthe modern U.S. currency system can be traced in large part to England. Many important features of the U.S. currency system were based on English models. The
early history of paper currency in England was
dominated by the government’s need for specie
revenues to finance its foreign wars. This need
caused the government to establish two principles—Bank of England monopoly, and strict specie
convertibility—as the basis for England’s system of
paper currency. ‘these principles had a profound
effect on the evolution of paper currency and
banking in the United Kingdom, and later in the
United States.
In England, the notion of organized note issue
seems to have arisen during the latter part of the
seventeenth century. At the time, England had
had a government-monopoly coin currency
system for several centuries, and had begun to
develop a paper currency system based on bills of
exchange.” During the last decade of the seventeenth century several groups of entrepreneurs
recognized an opportunity to profit by providing a
more convenient paper currency. Each ofthese
groups sought royal charters for banks of issue.
Horsefield (1960) singles out four groups for
special study. One of them, led by William Paterson,
proposed a bank which would lend convertible
notes on commercial security. The new bank
was called the Bank of England. It received a
charter in 1695, and has operated continuously
since; it is now the central bank of the United
Kingdom. ‘4
Currency System Evolution: AnAlternative View
As we have seen, U.S. monetary history has
been punctuated by a sequence of rather abrupt
transitions from one currency system to another
with very different features. These transitions are
often interpreted as part of a process of Darwinian
advancement—a process, that is, through which
old and relatively inefficient systems were replaced
by new and more efficient successors. The modern
currency system emerged out of this process as
the most efficient system yet devised.
While this historical interpretation certainly
sounds plausible, it is one that we should accept or
reject on the basis of evidence concerning the relative efficiency of past and present currency systems.
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”
― Lord Acton
3 thoughts on “The Problem of Monopoly. “The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” ― Lord Acton”