ORGANIZED SECURITY MARKETS 57 
also are usually affected profoundly, although more slowly, by 
an abundance or a scarcity of capital. But in this respect it is 
not unlikely that prices on the New York Stock Exchange are 
not today as sensitive to future business conditions as they 
formerly were. As long as the United States was a debtor 
nation, prices on the New York Stock Exchange were extremely 
sensitive to the influx or outflow of gold, and to every other 
important shift in the credit situation. More recently, however, 
the creditor status of this country, by practically obviating the 
old-fashioned credit shortage in Wall Street, has undoubtedly 
lessened the forecasting value of Stock Exchange prices, and 
has sometimes permitted them to remain stable or even to rise 
before and during a period when average company earnings 
fell, because excess capital seeking investment outweighed the 
poorer prospect of an increase in the value of equities. 
Thus, it is less safe today to indulge in dogmatic statements 
as to the inevitability of the barometric value of Stock Ex- 
change prices, than it was a decade ago. Nevertheless, with 
all these qualifications, as a rule Exchange prices still tend to 
forecast future business conditions. Moreover, a certain num- 
ber of business men presuppose that they always do and some- 
times guide their business policies accordingly—a fact which 
to that extent tends actually to increase their barometric value. 
Social Dangers of Organized Markets.—The principal, if 
not the only important social danger arising from the evolution 
of organized security exchanges, lies in just the high degree of 
perfection to which their facilities have been developed and 
made available to the public. In this, as in so many phases of 
American life, it may be that economic and mechanical progress 
has proved more swift than the social, moral and educational 
development necessary to adapt our daily lives to it. Anyone 
can, of course, speculate wildly in second-hand overcoats or 
tomatoes or almost any other article, as well as in securities. 
But it is not as easy to do so, because the markets for such 
articles are not as organized and readily accessible. It is the