tailieunhanh - THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRISH SAVINGS BANKS

Investors can buy shares of the fund, and their shares rise or fall in value as the values of the stocks and bonds in the fund rise and fall. Investors may typically pay a fee when they buy or sell their shares in the fund, and those fees in part pay the sala- ries and expenses of the professionals who manage the fund. Even small fees can and do add up and eat into a significant chunk of the returns a mutual fund is likely to produce, so you need to look carefully at how much a fund costs and think about. | THE EARLY HISTORY OF IRISH SAVINGS BANKS Cormac Ó Gráda School of Economics University College Dublin Dublin 4 1 1 Prepared for the Workshop on Poor Relief Charity and Self Help Oxford Brookes University 29 February 2008. THE EARLY HISTORY OF SAVINGS BANKS Cormac Ó Gráda When a poor man has saved up a little money he generally puts it into the Funds as it is called or deposits it in a savings bank which does this for him he is then one of the Government s creditors. and all Government creditors that is all who have money in the Funds or in the savings banks receive their share of it as a just debt. Irish National School Reading Book No. 41 1. BEGINNINGS It is often suggested that the poor and the working classes don t save or at least that they don t save Controversies about the trade-off between economic justice and economic growth turn in part at least on this assumption. Social reformers however have long sought to make the poor save. In Britain during the Industrial Revolution when the safety nets of the parish and the extended family were being stretched by an increasingly mobile labour force and by technological change there was no shortage of schemes for encouraging them to do so. These schemes were particularly directed at industrious and frugal servants and tradesmen and more generally at those who might easily be reduced to destitution by unemployment illness or old age. Saving for a rainy day might have been second nature to the sober businessman and the frugal farmer not so the labourer or the servant. One early proponent claimed that saving was not an intuitive faculty of the mind and needed to be taught like reading and In 1793 the British parliament passed a scheme to promote friendly societies. Soon though such societies were being criticised for being wasteful and too narrowly focused. The idea of a banking institution created specifically to promote saving by the poor grew out of an emerging critique of .