ABSTRACT
The Chamber of Commerce puts in the first place among the causes of the crisis the general increase in productive capacity. That is only too familiar a phenomenon in the crises of the nineteenth century: over-production, beyond a certain limit, leading to falling prices, restriction of production, and the other symptoms of crisis. The crisis is not a partial crisis, not, for instance, merely an industrial or merely an agrarian crisis, but a universal one. The consequences of "general" over-production are thus a general reduction of prices accompanied by an increase in consumption, a general increase in the standard of living, never in the life of man a general crisis. The political economists have long recognized that the talk of over-production will not hold water. Accordingly, the search for causes began to be transferred to the other end—to consumption.
