单项选择题

A. Each commercial bank, as it obtains reserves and expands its deposits, could grow at an inappropriate rate. One way of controlling the growth rate of deposits is to require banks to stand ready to redeem their deposits in some valuable commodity. Another is to institute a central bank charged with keeping reserves.
B. Central bank needs to guard against bank failures, particularly if there are many relatively small banks. This is not to say that central banks always did prevent widespread bank failures. But a central bank should act as institution able and willing in a crisis to make loans to banks when other banks cannot, or will not to do so.
C. In addition to its services for commercial banks, a central bank provides many other services. The government keeps an account at the central bank, writes its checks on this account, and, in some countries, sells its securities through central bank. Another group of services to the government arises directly out of the central bank’s close relation with commercial banks. Thus the central bank typically administrators certain controls over commercial bank.
D. Although central banks are part of the government, they maintain a certain detachment from the rest of it. They usually have much more independence from the administration than do such government agencies as the Treasury.
E. Banking in Great Britain is dominated by four major banks (National Westminster, Bar clays, Midland, and Lloyds), but twenty major non-British banks compete for the British pound deposits and loans of major and modest customers. Similarly, the three big German banks ( Deutsche, Dresdner, and Commerz) have encountered increased competition for loan and deposit business from fifty branches of foreign banks in Frankfurt, Düseldorf, and Hamburg.