64 The Stock Market Crash—dAnd After 
commitments. Because of such fear it might have 
suspended its plans for building factories. It might 
have retrenched in expenditures, it might have dis- 
charged employees, shut up works, and fallen into a 
state of paralysis which would spread as the unem- 
ployed in industry ceased to have purchasing power 
to sustain business. In that case, fear would have 
produced the same effect as if there were some reason 
in conditions themselves for a business depression. 
In particular, some business executives who sus- 
tained heavy personal losses in the stock market were, 
indeed, reduced to a state of panic, or overcaution in 
their commitments, so that they were not so ready 
to carry forward programs mapped out before the 
crash. Many executives in the important industrial 
concerns had believed in their own companies and 
had invested heavily in them. Undoubtedly this is 
true of the stocks of hundreds of companies. Under 
the impact of their losses these executives were ac- 
tually frightened into beginning to curtail operations, 
not so much because it accorded with their deliberate 
and reasoned judgment, but because of the abnormal 
state. of mind into which they had been thrown 
because of their personal losses. 
To the extent that these executives did shut down 
their shops or withhold business expenditures, their 
acts, engendered by fear, would cause unemployment 
and maldistribution of consumer purchasing power. 
In such a situation the emergency measures taken 
by the President and the United States Chamber of 
Commerce were calculated to allay the first effects