Not only business recovery, but the general economic recovery of
the nation will be greatly stimulated by the enactment of
legislation designed to improve the status of our transportation
agencies. There is need for legislation providing for the
regulation of interstate transportation by buses and trucks, for
the regulation of transportation by water, for the strengthening of
our Merchant Marine and Air Transport, for the strengthening of the
Interstate Commerce Commission to enable it to carry out a rounded
conception of the national transportation system in which the
benefits of private ownership are retained while the public stake
in these important services is protected by the public's
government.

Finally, the reestablishment of public confidence in the banks of
the nation is one of the most hopeful results of our efforts as a
Nation to reestablish public confidence in private banking. We all
know that private banking actually exists by virtue of the
permission of and regulation by the people as a whole, speaking
through their government. Wise public policy, however, requires not
only that banking be safe but that its resources be most fully
utilized in the economic life of the country. To this end it was
decided more than twenty years ago that the government should
assume the responsibility of providing a means by which the credit
of the nation might be controlled, not by a few private banking
institutions, but by a body with public prestige and authority. The
answer to this demand was the Federal Reserve System. Twenty years
of experience with this system have justified the efforts made to
create it, but these twenty years have shown by experience definite
possibilities for improvement. Certain proposals made to amend the
Federal Reserve Act deserve prompt and favorable action by the