In 1912, a merchant in Ceylon could sell tea to a buyer in London without either party touching gold or waiting months for payment. The seller drew a bill of exchange on the buyer, payable in ninety days. Anyone with capital could purchase the bill: a neighbor, a trading partner, a local merchant with idle funds. Banks competed for this business, but they held no monopoly over it. The bill then traveled to London, where it traded in liquid markets until maturity, when it settled in gold or gold-convertible banknotes. No government coordinated this. The Bank of England, which had held a growing monopoly on English banknote issuance since 1844, stood ready to rediscount bills in crisis, but the private market handled ordinary conditions. The system had evolved over centuries, financing the majority of world trade through private commercial paper backed by real goods.
Two years later, it was dead.
Understanding what was lost requires understanding what a bill of exchange actually was and how it moved through the world.
The Instrument
A bill of exchange is fundamentally a peer-to-peer instrument. Two merchants, a buyer and a seller, can create, transfer, and settle a bill without any bank, broker, or financial intermediary touching it. Banks eventually emerged to provide convenience, but they were never necessary. The mechanism predates modern banking by centuries and operated between merchants long before anyone formalized the role of discount house or acceptance house. Every intermediary that later grew up around bills existed to make the system faster or more liquid, not to make it possible. Problems arose only when intermediaries introduced custody, holding bills on behalf of others rather than merely facilitating their transfer.
Cheques and banknotes themselves emerged from bills of exchange. The banknote began as a bill in different clothes, a promise to pay issued by a bank. The cheque was an order to pay drawn on a bank. These later instruments inherited the bill's fundamental logic even as they transformed it. Understanding bills means understanding the ancestor of the entire modern payments system.
With that understood, here is the anatomy of the instrument.
A bill of exchange is a written, unconditional order from one party commanding another to pay a specified sum on a specified future date. It is not a promise to pay, like a promissory note. It is an order, a command, drawn by a creditor upon a debtor. Three parties appear on its face: the drawer who creates and signs it, the drawee who is ordered to pay, and the payee who will receive payment. In most commercial transactions, the drawer and payee were the same person: the seller, who drew the bill on his buyer and made it payable to himself.
No bank is required to create a bill. No financial institution must bless the transaction. A seller with paper and ink draws on a buyer who accepts, and a negotiable instrument exists. The bill is a creature of contract between merchants, not a product dispensed by financial intermediaries. Banks entered this system as service providers competing for the merchant's business, not as gatekeepers controlling access to credit.
The bill states a sum certain (standardized "face values" came later with banknotes), its usance (the term until payment, typically thirty, sixty, or ninety days), and the name and location of the drawee. A wool merchant in Sydney selling one thousand pounds of fleece to a Manchester textile manufacturer would write something like: "At ninety days sight, pay to my order the sum of One Thousand Pounds Sterling," addressed to the manufacturer, signed by himself. This piece of paper, until accepted, was merely a claim that the Sydney merchant asserted against the Manchester buyer.
Acceptance
The bill travels to the drawee, who may accept or refuse it. Acceptance transforms the bill from an assertion into an obligation. The drawee writes "Accepted" across the face, signs, and dates it. From that moment, he is the acceptor, primarily liable for payment at maturity. The bill becomes negotiable, tradeable, almost as liquid as money itself.
For international trade, a complication arose: the seller in Sydney might not know whether the buyer in Manchester was creditworthy, and no one in Sydney might know either. This problem generated one of the bill market's key institutions: the acceptance house. These were merchant banks, often founded by families with trading connections across multiple countries, who would accept bills on behalf of buyers for a small fee. When Baring Brothers or Rothschild or Kleinwort or Schröder or Hambro accepted a bill, they added their name and guarantee to the instrument. The original buyer remained obligated to reimburse the acceptance house, but the world could now trade the bill based on the acceptor's reputation rather than the unknown buyer's.
But acceptance houses were optional. A seller who knew his buyer's reputation, or who could verify it through his own network, needed no intermediary. The buyer accepted the bill himself, and the seller either held it to maturity or found someone willing to discount it based on the buyer's name alone. Acceptance houses served merchants who lacked direct knowledge of distant counterparties. They competed fiercely for this business, and any merchant bank with sufficient capital and reputation could enter the trade. No charter, no license, no government permission. The barrier to entry was having the knowledge to judge creditworthiness and the capital to back that judgment. An acceptance house's willingness to put its name on a bill was itself a judgment of creditworthiness, made by people with strong incentives to judge correctly and priced by a market that punished errors ruthlessly.
Discounting
The Sydney merchant now holds an accepted bill payable in ninety days. He wants money now. He has options.
He might hold the bill himself and present it at maturity. He might pay his own suppliers by endorsing the bill over to them, who accept it because they know his reputation and can verify the acceptor's. He might sell it to a wealthy neighbor with idle capital seeking safe short-term returns. The bill circulates as a negotiable instrument in its own right, passing from hand to hand among merchants, investors, and speculators who trade claims on future gold the way others trade commodities. No bank need be involved at all.
But banks and discount houses competed aggressively for this business, because bills were among the safest and most liquid assets available. In London alone, a dozen major discount houses and scores of smaller bill brokers bid against each other for paper. Overend, Gurney and Company. The National Discount Company. The Union Discount Company. Alexander and Company. Samuel Montagu. Countless smaller operators. Each maintained relationships with merchants across the empire, each sought to offer better rates or faster service, each knew that a merchant dissatisfied with the terms could walk across the street to a competitor.
The merchant takes his bill to one of these houses, which purchases it at a discount from face value. If the discount rate is four percent annually, a ninety-day bill for one thousand pounds sells for approximately nine hundred ninety pounds. The merchant receives immediate payment. The discounter will collect the full face value at maturity, earning roughly ten pounds for ninety days of waiting and risk-bearing.
Competition kept discount rates low. A house that charged too much lost business to rivals. A house that accepted too much bad paper suffered losses and lost its own access to credit. The market disciplined both greed and recklessness simultaneously. Provincial merchants could discount locally or send bills to London for the keenest rates. London discount houses could rediscount with each other or, in extremity, with the Bank of England. At every level, alternatives existed.
The discount rate is distinct from the interest rate, though modern economists often conflate them. The interest rate reflects the time preference for money: the premium required to postpone consumption. The discount rate reflects the scarcity of liquidity: when demand for money holdings rises, liquidity falls; discounting bills increases it. When trade expands and bills multiply, the discount rate rises. When trade contracts, it falls. This price signal coordinates the entire system without central direction.
This relationship is important because fiat currency inverts it. Under the bill system, expanding trade raised the discount rate, naturally limiting credit growth. Under fiat, central banks lower rates to stimulate borrowing, flooding the economy with credit precisely when restraint would be prudent. The self-correcting mechanism becomes a self-amplifying one.
When the merchant sells the bill, he endorses it: signs his name on the back. This endorsement is not merely a transfer of ownership. It is a guarantee.
The Guarantee Chain
Every endorser of a bill guarantees its payment. This is the mechanism that made the system self-regulating and, more than that, antifragile. Under fiat banking, when one bank fails, all other banks begin to distrust each other, and panic spreads. Under the bill system, each additional endorsement strengthened rather than weakened the instrument. As the bill circulates from hand to hand, each new holder endorses it to the next, and each endorsement adds another guarantor to the chain.
Consider a bill that passes through six hands before maturity: from the original drawer in Sydney to a local bank, to a London correspondent bank, to a bill broker, to a discount house, and finally to an investor who holds it to maturity. Each of these parties has endorsed the bill. Each has guaranteed payment.
At maturity, the investor presents the bill to the acceptor for payment. If the acceptor pays, the transaction completes and all parties are released from their guarantees. The bill is marked paid and ceases to exist.
But suppose the acceptor cannot pay. Perhaps the Manchester manufacturer has gone bankrupt. The investor holds a dishonored bill. He has it "protested," a formal notarization recording the refusal to pay. Now the guarantee chain activates.
The investor may claim the full amount from any endorser or from the original drawer. He might pursue the discount house that sold him the bill, which then pursues the bill broker, which pursues the London bank, which pursues the Sydney bank, which pursues the original drawer. Alternatively, the investor might skip intermediaries and claim directly from the drawer. Each party who pays can then recover from those earlier in the chain.
This structure created powerful, self-enforcing incentives. Every participant in the bill market staked their own money and reputation on every bill they touched. A merchant who endorsed a bill that was later dishonored was liable for its full value. A discount house that accepted too much bad paper absorbed the loss. An acceptance house that mispriced risk suffered, though correct pricing and careful judgment typically yielded profitable trade rather than ruin. No one needed a regulator to tell them to evaluate counterparties carefully. Their own judgment counted, and their own fortunes depended on it.
The result was a dense network of mutual surveillance and reputation. Merchants knew which buyers paid reliably and which did not; those who dishonored bills were ostracized permanently, shut out of commercial credit for life. Discount houses and acceptance houses maintained intelligence networks spanning continents, tracking the creditworthiness of firms they might be asked to guarantee. A single dishonored bill could end a merchant's career, because no one would endorse his paper again. This was spontaneous order through liability, not bureaucracy.
Gold Settlement
At maturity, the bill must be paid. Under the classical gold standard, this meant settlement in gold, either directly or through instruments convertible to gold on demand. The second option carried a verification problem: how could the holder know the bank would actually redeem on demand? This question, largely ignored during normal times, became acute during crises.
For domestic transactions within a single country, settlement was straightforward in principle. The holder presented the bill to the acceptor, who paid in gold coin, gold-backed banknotes, or a bank transfer representing a gold-convertible deposit. The holder could, if he wished, demand physical gold from the bank. Large settlements typically moved as ledger entries between banks rather than as physical metal, but the convertibility was supposed to be there, always enforceable. Whether demand deposits were truly as good as gold remained a question the system preferred not to test too often.
International settlement was more elegant. Shipping gold across oceans was expensive: insurance, transport, interest lost during the voyage, and the risk of loss together cost roughly half a percent of the gold's value. Bills of exchange allowed trade to clear without moving metal.
When an English textile firm bought wool from Sydney, the Sydney merchant drew a bill on the English buyer, payable in London in pounds sterling. The merchant sold this bill to a Sydney bank at a discount, receiving Australian pounds immediately. The Sydney bank sent the bill to its London correspondent, who collected payment at maturity and credited the Sydney bank's London account. The Sydney bank now held a pound sterling balance in London.
But the Sydney bank operated in Australian pounds. It did not want to hold sterling indefinitely. Here the system's elegance emerged. English merchants were simultaneously buying Australian wheat, meat, and minerals. Australian importers were buying English manufactures. In each direction, exporters drew bills on importers. The Sydney bank could use its London sterling balance to purchase bills drawn on Australian buyers, payable in Sydney in Australian pounds. When those bills matured, the bank collected in its home currency.
In equilibrium, bills flowing in each direction roughly offset. Australian exports to England generated sterling claims in London. English exports to Australia generated Australian pound claims in Sydney. Banks in both cities exchanged these claims, and the trade balanced without gold ever crossing the ocean.
When trade persistently imbalanced, gold did flow, but the mere possibility of gold shipment kept exchange rates stable. If sterling weakened against Australian pounds beyond the cost of shipping gold (about half a percent), arbitrageurs would ship gold from London to Sydney, profiting from the exchange rate difference. This set boundaries, called gold points, within which exchange rates fluctuated. The threat of arbitrage kept rates stable without anyone needing to manage them.
The London bill market sat at the center of this global web. Sterling bills drawn on London financed trade between parties who never touched England: American cotton to German mills, Argentine beef to French tables, Indian tea to Russian samovars. London's position came not from empire but from the depth and reliability of its bill market, the concentration of acceptance houses and discount houses, and the confidence that a bill payable in London would be paid in gold.
The Self-Liquidating Quality
A bill of exchange drawn on goods in transit possesses a quality that distinguishes it from other credit instruments: it liquidates itself. The wool shipped from Sydney will arrive in Manchester, be manufactured into textiles, sold to consumers, and generate the revenue to pay the bill. The bill's maturity matches the time required for this process, provided those who created and discounted the bill exercised sound judgment about the goods and the buyer. When the bill comes due, the goods have been sold, the money exists, and the payment happens.
This is why Adam Smith's Real Bills Doctrine held that banks discounting genuine commercial bills could not over-expand credit. A mortgage depends on the borrower's income for thirty years; if income falters, the loan sours. A government bond depends on future taxation; if the political will to tax wavers, the bond defaults. A bill drawn on wool already purchased by eager buyers depends only on the completion of a transaction already in progress. The seller creates the credit when the goods ship; the buyer extinguishes it when the goods sell. The total volume of bills in circulation expands and contracts automatically with the volume of goods moving to consumers.
The Austrian Debate
The Austrian school remains divided on whether this system constituted sound money. Murray Rothbard, advocating one hundred percent gold reserves, argued that any credit not backed coin-for-coin by gold expanded the money supply and enabled the boom-bust cycle. When a bank discounts a bill, paying out gold or deposits for paper, it creates claims on gold exceeding the gold it holds. This, in Rothbard's view, was fractional reserve banking regardless of what backed the paper.
There is something to this critique, though the problem lies in contract structure rather than economics. Classical banknotes promised redemption on demand, yet banks held fractional reserves. This mismatch between legal obligation and operational reality created vulnerability. But the issue was the demand-deposit contract, not the bill of exchange itself. Bills never promised instant redemption. They stated a maturity date, and payment was due then, not before.
The opposing view, articulated most thoroughly by Antal Fekete, holds that Rothbard conflated clearing with money creation. A bill is not money. It is a credit instrument that matures into money and then ceases to exist. Money circulates indefinitely, but bills extinguish themselves. When a discount house purchases a bill, it parts with present money for a claim on future money. Its liquidity falls temporarily but is replenished at maturity. This is not inflation but time preference made tradeable.
The bill system functioned for seven centuries, financed the Industrial Revolution, and collapsed only when governments intervened to monopolize money creation. Even free-issue banking, while superior to central banking, may grant too much discretion and introduce problems absent from pure bill circulation. The strongest case may be for free minting of commercial bills without the intermediation of bank-issued currency at all: bills circulating directly as the commercial credit layer, with final settlement in gold.
The Destruction
In August 1914, the bill market seized within days. War between the great powers meant debtors across Europe could not ship gold or draw new bills. Acceptance houses demanded payment from buyers who could not pay. The London Stock Exchange closed for five months. The British government suspended gold convertibility, issued paper currency without gold backing, and never fully restored the pre-war system.
After the war, governments attempted to reconstruct a gold standard, but they made a fatal error: Britain restored convertibility at the pre-war gold ratio despite having inflated the currency massively during the war. This meant deflation was required to make the old parity work, crushing debtors and contracting the economy. The result was the instability and eventual collapse of the 1930s. The bill market's absence mattered less than the impossible arithmetic of restoring an old price in a new world.
The Federal Reserve, created in 1913, was explicitly designed to discount real bills for member banks. Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act authorized discounting "notes, drafts, and bills of exchange arising out of actual commercial transactions." But the Fed corrupted the doctrine, discounting government securities and speculative paper alongside genuine commercial bills. What Adam Smith described as a natural limit on credit expansion became, in government hands, a justification for unlimited expansion.
Today, bills of exchange survive in niche applications, overshadowed by letters of credit and bank-intermediated finance. The elasticity once provided by self-liquidating commercial paper is now provided by money creation, the bulk of it not by central banks but by commercial banks creating demand deposits out of nothing. Politicians have replaced a decentralized system backed by goods, enforced by mutual liability, and settled in gold, with a centralized system backed by government promises, enforced by legal tender laws, and settled in whatever the central bank decides money is this week.
The market had already solved the problem of commercial credit. Governments unsolved it.