¶ Building Business (2)
← Building Business (1) | Building Business (3) →
Index Entry
Building Business:
"We had world War I. It became a world war because it involved not just the agricultural advantages of the different countries, but suddenly the realization that taking metals and tins from the Malay Straits and throwing it thinly onto steel sheets to make tin cans which would hermetically seal food, and food that used to rot and never reach mouths, could suddenly feed people around the world. An entirely new world resource was the metals that came into use. That’s why it was called World war I, rather then the local farming identities of individual nations.
“We have then in World War I the development of enormous production capability. After the war the production capability, the buildings, did not go away. And it was invested in two main ways. Producing automobiles, which the banks did not like because they did not like that kind of mortgage. But later they went into farm machinery and sold the farm machinery to the farmer on time payments; and the banks did like that because they took in not only chattel mortgages on the machinery but mortgages on the farms as well. In the bad year, 1926, the farmers could not pay their instalments on the machinery and gradually all the farms were taken in on foreclosed mortgages. This would be the whole basis of the great '29 crash.”
