Discount house,

Definition of Discount house:

1. US: Large retail store that offers consumer durables at heavily discounted prices, due to its bulk-buying power and bare minimum expenses on customer service.

2. UK: Firm that buys and discounts bills of exchange, banker acceptance, commercial paper, etc. Discount houses also tender for treasury bills, deal in short-dated government bonds, and are an important part of the short-term money markets. Also called bill broker.

3. Also known as bill brokers, discount houses primarily operated in the United Kingdom, playing a key role in the financial system there until the mid-1990s. They no longer exist as separate financial institutions, though some still remain in India and other nations.

4. In the financial world, a discount house is a firm that specializes in trading, discounting, and negotiating bills of exchange or promissory notes. Its transactions are generally performed on a large scale with transactions that also include government bonds and Treasury bills.

How to use Discount house in a sentence?

1. Discount houses are financial institutions that act as money lenders, or serve as intermediaries between commerical lenders and borrowers, trading in various short-term securities and instruments.
2. By 2000, British discount houses largely ceased to exist as separate financial institutions.
3. Mainly located in the U.K., discount houses once provided a ready secondary market, thus ensuring liquidity in the British monetary system. The Bank of England often operated through discount houses to help regulate the money supply, set interest rates, and extend credit to commercial banks.