London: Methuen, 1978, pp. x t 351.517.95).This book performs the most useful task of bringing together the available statistical and factual information on the trends in company financing over a long period. The information is supplemented by analysis and commentary.The nature and availability of statistics dictate a split of the work into two self-contained parts, the first dealing with the inter-war period and the second with that after the last war. In the inter-war period there were no global statistics of company accounts and they would have been of doubtful use if they had existed because of the absence of a consolidation requirement. Instead Dr. Thomas examines several aspects separately, using whatever estimates are available from those who have researched into the period, These aspects are the demand for funds, the establishment of the domestic new issue market, bank lending, internal funds, and the Macmillan and other gaps. For the post-war period the author elects to follow the same procedure, dealing in turn with the capital market, bank lending, internal finance, and trade credit, but he is able to make use of the new statistics derived from the consolidated accounts of industrial and commercial companies and from flow-of-funds tables to round the picture off with a summary of the broad trends.The coverage of sources appears to be fairly complete, although there is one gap in the omission of the research by Grant and Davis at the Department of Applied Economics on the financial pressures on companies during the two critical years of 1969 and 1970. Where the book can be faulted is in the absence of broad hypotheses to explain the trends found in the statistics. Some of the sources quoted presented such hypotheses. The author mentions the detailed points that were made in these sources, but he does not usually mention the hypotheses and he is unwilling to advance any of his own. The structure of the book and even the layout of some of the tables would probably have been greatly improved if he had attempted to convey the broad sweep, certainly for the post war period, and occasionally to "go nap" on a hypothesis. As it is, the book is good at explanations for particular sub-periods, but the reader is not helped to discern apy secular trends over the past thirty years.One such hypothesis concerns the role of the banking system in meeting the financial needs of industrial and commercial companies over the period. Faced with a drop in the availability of internally generated funds, companies would normally have looked to the capital market to make up the shortfall. The capital market, however, was dominated by two large movements, both of which the author mentions briefly. These movements were the massive sales of company securities by personal holders and the growth of the institutional investors, particularly insurance companies and pension funds. Aided by the Book Reviews
