Like the daily cooperation of living men, this cooperation of past,
present and future is essential to the well-being of mankind, and yet
it is undesigned and unorganized. As private individuals, men do,
indeed, deliberately provide for their own future, and for that of
their kith and kin: as the directors of businesses, they try to
forecast the trend of demand. But such conscious calculations and
deliberate acts would avail little if they stood alone. They are
hardly more than the necessary spokes in the great wheel which
regulates the relations of past, present and future. The hub of the
wheel is an elaborate system of borrowing and lending, essentially
similar to the buying and selling of commodities. The private
individual in order to provide for his family or for his old age
"saves" and "invests." But what exactly does this mean? It means that
he transfers so much purchasing power, which he might have spent on
his personal pleasures, to some one else in return for the expectation
of receiving, year by year in the future, he and his heirs after him,
a certain smaller quantity of purchasing power. The other party to the
transaction will be, we may suppose, a business man who enters into it
because he sees the opportunity of a promising industrial development,
to undertake which he requires more purchasing power than he himself
possesses. And, because this transaction is entered into, a smaller
number of us will shortly be engaged in making motorcars, or
gramaphones, and a larger number of us in making factories and
machinery, which will later enhance the world's productive power.

Many transactions of the kind take place daily in modern communities,
and their multiplicity gives rise to a mass of phenomena with which we
are all tolerably familiar. We recognize a short-loan market, a stock
exchange, a number of "markets" where lenders and borrowers are
brought together by the aid of various intermediaries, such as banks,