It is not, however, the practice of the stock market to appraise values so coolly end conservatively and there can be no doubt that extraneous circumstances have been in large part responsible for the somewhat premature and unexpected fall from grace. The collapse of commodity prices in the early Spring followed by the very remarkable and abrupt paralysis of American industry in the Autumn have probably been the most important causal factors. It still remains a strange phenomenon that links depression in prices with continuing cheap money and an industry working at high pressure and still showing rising profits; this is the situation in Great Britain to-day.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.