Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Reasons and Remedies for Our Business Troubles: An Address, Delivered Before the Commercial Club and the Pittsburgh Industrial Development Commission at Pittsburgh, May 22nd, 1914
It is useless to blink the fact that we are in serious trouble. At the end of a long series of years of bountiful crops and with a record-breaking harvest for the present year assured, when optimism should be rampant, we are confronted every where by business contraction and depression. The New York banks are overflowing, call money on Stock Exchange collateral is a drug in the market, as is always the case when business is languishing, and yet it is impossible to secure loans on improved unencumbered real estate or investment funds for new enter prises on any terms. Capital is everywhere hoarding its re sources for some emergency and the small investor seems to have disappeared. Why? Until we have diagnosed the disease it would be dangerous to attempt to apply the remedy. There are doubt less contributing world-causes but they are so remote as to be almost negligible. There are such things as world cycles of business and financial depression due to destructive wars, widespread famine, panics brought about by over-straining the world's capital resources and by over-speculation - but no such conditions confront us at the moment. True, the Balkan War and the demands upon European cen tres for funds with which to refinance the Balkan States are and' will for some time continue to be a severe drain and will divert European capital from us, as do the attractions of the vast new enterprises in Russia, South America and the Far East. But we have accumulated wealth So rapidly that we are year by year less dependent on the investment of new foreign capital in our country, although it is still very important to us that existing investments shall not be withdrawn as they have been recently. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
