Page:Hints About Investments (1926).pdf/111

 taught us that, if a central Government falls altogether to pieces and is succeeded by one that repudiates its obligations, or even if (as in the German example) a central Government divides the value of the currency by a sufficient number of millions, the most attractive-looking municipal loan will be found to have no health in it. Nevertheless, their finances being on a smaller scale and covering a smaller area, can be more closely watched by the citizens who suffer if they are ill administered; on the other hand, municipal extravagance is often a source of profit to local contractors and land jobbers and where politics are corrupt, the street corner corruption of local politics is likely to be especially corrosive and disgusting. And the judicious investor, before he handles such securities on his own judgment, ought to know a good deal more than he is likely to find out about the system of taxation from which foreign or even colonial municipalities collect their revenues, and whether it suffers from the defects which we found in the rating system in England.

But, as has already been hinted, perhaps the really judicious investor in Foreign Public Debts is he who makes no attempt to investigate all the incalculable and elusive details that make up a sound security of this