ABSTRACT
The chapter recognizes as characteristics and pre-requisites of capitalistic enterprise the following: appropriation of the physical means of production by the entrepreneur, freedom of the market, rational technology, rational law, free labor, and finally the commercialization of economic life. The Bank of England remained standing in all its former prestige, being the only financial institution based on the rational discounting of exchange and hence possessing the requisite current liquidity. The great tulip craze of Holland in the 1630's is often numbered among the great speculative crises, but it should not be so included. Speculative crises of a similar sort have taken place from that time forward, but never since on the same scale. Crises in the broader sense of chronic unemployment, destitution, glutting of the market and political disturbances which destroy all industrial life, have existed always and everywhere.
