quotation of its securities. These unincumbered competitors are presumed to be making reasonable profits at current prices, and their presence in the competitive market therefore precludes an advance of prices to such a scale as would afford a reasonable profit to the other establishments after paying their interest charges on what is, in effect, overcapitalized property.
This tentative explanation of depression applies only so far as the period of depression is a time of relatively low rates of interest. But depression does not uniformly coincide with low interest rates ; besides which, there are other facts in the case which limit the applicability of the explanation formulated above. To explain protracted depression, e.g., this line of argument would convincing only on the supposition of a progressively falling rate of interest, — a condition