The Threat to Business 61 
But the threat to business most feared, namely, the 
twenty-six billion deflation in listed paper values, 
so full of sound and fury, signifies little. It is now 
more universally recognized that in the fall of paper 
values there had been merely a transfer of wealth, 
not a destruction of any physical wealth, even if there 
were a lowered valuation. 
This is because the crisis, unlike the 1920 crisis 
was not a violent fall of an inflated commodity price 
level. Business stoppage and unemployment could 
hardly follow a stock panic, because such a case wipes 
out profits and substitutes losses, and no concern can 
afford long to run at a loss. But such a loss could 
hardly follow a stock panic. 
It is true that there was danger from the panic to 
business in the huge transfer of security holdings 
from one set of owners to another set from the 
poorer to the richer, which might in some measure 
deplete the purchasing power of consumers of the 
middle class. But the slump in stock prices destroyed 
no physical assets. 
As stock prices gradually rose from the panic bot- 
tom it was found that, to a large extent, the crash 
in prices had robbed thousands of Peters to pay a 
very few Pauls. There were the same factories in 
all the centers of industry producing the same line 
of goods, with a difference, so far as could be ob- 
served, that there was now a new set of shareholders. 
By the transfer there would be some dislocation in 
demand for goods. The sanguine buyer of stocks 
at the old high prices would no longer own the