or it has
completed another cycle.

Sec. 7. #General features of a crisis.# Altho irregular in time of
occurrence and unlike in their immediate occasions, financial crises
show certain general features. They are a part of the larger movement
here outlined as the business cycle. Some have thought this cycle to
be normally a period of ten years, divided into one year of crisis,
three years of depression, three years of recovery, and three years of
unusual prosperity. This succession of events occurs pretty regularly,
though not in the regular intervals of time. Crises are more severe in
countries with more extensive use of money and credit, but still more
severe where the credit system is more loosely administered and less
efficiently cooerdinated. They are harder in the United States and
England than in Germany, harder in Germany than in France, harder in
western Europe than in eastern Europe, harder in Christendom than in
heathendom. They are less severe in rural districts, where prosperity
depends more on crop conditions, and business has in it less of
financial speculation. Their effects are least felt in the staple
industries, for when hard times come people economize on the
less essential things. The glove-factory, the silk-factory, the
golf-club-factory are more likely to close than the flour-mill. In
a crisis wages and salaries are less affected than are profits, but
wageworkers suffer in the loss of employment. Those money lenders who
have eliminated chance as far as possible and have taken a low rate
of interest lose little; the risk-takers who draw their incomes from
dividends on stock or from bonds of a less stable kind, often lose
much.

Sec. 8. #"Glut" theories of crises#. Many explanations of the causes of
financial crises have been offered.[7] Nearly all of these belong to
the general group of "glut" theories, of which genus there are two
species, under-consumption and over-production theories. These are, in
truth, but two aspects of the same idea.[8] The one view is that too
many goods are produced, the other that too few are consumed. The
over-production theorist seeing that in a crisis warehouses are filled
with goods that cannot be disposed of for what they cost (or at best,
not so as to give a profit), and that factories are shut down and men
are out of employment for lack of demand, declares that productive
power has grown too great. The under-consumption theorist, seeing
the same facts, says that