“For three hundred years our history has been marked by the alternations of ‘prosperity’ and ‘distress’ which are produced by the booms and their collapses. When the collapse comes, the people who are left long on goods and land [and stocks] always make a great outcry and start a political agitation. Their favorite device always is to try to inflate the currency and raise prices again until they can unload. . . . No scheme which has ever been devised by them has ever made a collapsed boom go up again.”
History of American Currency, by William Graham Sumner
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