Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/67

Rh lent to the Treasury during the war was £438,311,000, of which £320,454,955 had been returned to holders, leaving £117,856,045 still on deposit, from which it follows, that Great Britain still has about two billion dollars of our securities.

According to Edgar Crammond, in a recent address to the British Institute of Bankers, the foreign and colonial investments of Great Britain previous to the war amounted to about £3,554,000,000. That figure comprised only the capital invested in foreign or colonial loans and in public undertakings and companies. It did not include the capital privately invested abroad in the purchase of land, etc., nor the capital employed abroad by the principal British banking, mercantile and shipping houses. Assuming that these private investments were as much as 10 per cent of the public investments (a very moderate estimate) the total of British foreign investments at the end of 1913 was four billion pounds. Since 1913, the bulk of Great Britain’s American holdings and a large proportion of its Canadian and Japanese stocks and a small percentage of its South American investments have been sold, the aggregate of these sales having been about one billion pounds.

Not included in the statement immediately preceding is a good deal of property in the United States owned by aliens either privately or through close corporations. There is no reasonable way of arriving at the amount or value of this.

The total value of the property of foreign ownership in the United States that was seized at the beginning