Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
2 The most recent expositions of this view would include Broadberry, S. N. and Crafts, N. F. R., ‘Explaining Anglo-American productivity differences in the mid twentieth century’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 52 (1990)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Britain's productivity gap in the 1930s: some neglected factors’, Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992)Google Scholar; and Mercer, H. J., Constructing a Competitive Order: The Hidden History of British Anti-Trust Policies (Cambridge, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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41 FHARPC: Pollard, para. 70, p. 42.Google Scholar From 1947 to 1958 there were severe restrictions on bank lending for hire-purchase purposes. Except for a short respite between Aug. 1954 and Feb. 1955, the Capital Issues Committee refused applications for the raising of new capital by finance companies, with the result that the finance houses were restricted to raising of unsecured deposit money during these years. The lifting of sources of funds control between 1958 and 1960 was seen as causing a ‘scramble for bank credit’ which, it was alleged, caused the houses to seek more credit than they immediately required and a consequent attempt to find immediate outlets for these funds. Oliver, F. R. and Runcie, N., ‘The economic regulation of instalment credit in the United Kingdom’, in Diamond, A. L. (ed.), Instalment Credit (London, 1970), pp. 156 and 161.Google Scholar See also Runcie, N., ‘UK finance companies: the uses and sources of funds, 1949 to 1958’, The Bankers Magazine, 187 (1959), pp. 453–64Google Scholar and Artis, ‘Monetary policy’, p. 14.Google Scholar
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