$8 The Stock Market Crash—dAnd After 
even probable, that builders and automobile pro- 
ducers, in their eagerness to take advantage of ex- 
panding income, overestimated the public capacity 
to absorb their products. That would naturally lead 
to a dislocation in application of labor and capital, 
and in these lines a throwing of men out of work 
until they could be absorbed in other lines. But 
such absorption takes time. Many months must 
elapse before the building program projected by the 
states and the national government can aid in this 
process. 
The effect of the market crash will take time to 
become fully manifest. Sales have a period of incu- 
bation lasting for several weeks or even months, so 
that a full assessment of the damage wrought by the 
panic in curtailing sales cannot be made at once. There 
had already been a fall of commodity prices during 
the summer of 1929. After seventeen weeks of un- 
interrupted decline, the general wholesale price level 
registered a fractional advance; my all-commodity 
index fell from 99.1, the high point of the year in 
the week of July 26, to 92.2 for the week ended 
November 22, a drop of nearly seven points. This 
was a swifter decline than any since the index at- 
tained its base of 1926 as equal to 100. Although the 
index fell by 7.5 points between November, 1926, 
and July, 1927, during a rather marked business 
recession, it then took twice as long as the decline in 
the index during 1929. Fortunately in neither case 
was the fall in prices very great, and the latest evi- 
dence points to a rise in the index. While prediction