If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

Nevertheless, if we contemplate a society with a somewhat stable wage-unit, with national characteristics which determine the propensity to consume and the preference for liquidity, and with a monetary system which rigidly links the quantity of money to the stock of the precious metals, it will be essential for the maintenance of prosperity that the authorities should pay close attention to the state of the balance of trade. For a favourable balance, provided it is not too large, will prove extremely stimulating; whilst an unfavourable balance may soon produce a state of persistent depression.

The old saying holds. Owe your banker �1000 and you are at his mercy; owe him �1 million and the position is reversed.

It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

I do not mean to impugn the social justice and social expediency of the redistribution of incomes aimed at by N.I.R.A. and by the various schemes for agricultural restriction. The latter, in particular, I should strongly support in principle. But too much emphasis on the remedial value of a higher price-level as an object in itself may lead to serious misapprehension as to the part which prices can play in the technique of recovery. The stimulation of output by increasing aggregate purchasing power is the right way to get prices up; and not the other way round.

In the long run we are all dead.