Even the most casual examination serves to reveal the diversity and complexity of foreign trade. Almost countless thousands of separate import and export transactions occur every year, each one creating a distinct debtor-creditor relationship. In its broader sense foreign commerce includes much more than the exchange of goods. Myriads of other acts between human beings separated by an international frontier require payments from one to the other. Travel, insurance, investment, transportation, communication, education, philanthropy--all these can occur on an international scale only if there is some means by which international payments or settlements can be made.
Any sort of "exchange" raises monetary problems which increase in complexity in direct proportion with the difficulties of communication. Before the development of interregional banking systems, widely separated persons even in the same country found it necessary to engage in much laborious crisscross shipping of currency and specie in order to carry on trade. Most of these hindrances to domestic trade have been wiped out by modern central banking, which has provided such national clearing systems as that in the United States, but each of the nations in the world is still using its own type of currency or "money" and, despite all the proposals for an international clearing bank, there is no formal system or institution by which multitudinous currencies are converted one into the other.
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