TEE DEPRESSION.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VII, Issue 2144, 13 November 1885, Page 2

TEE DEPRESSION.

One or tw,o articles have lately appeared in the Taranaki Herald on the depression which at present present prevails iu New Zealand, and the writer asserts that it is almost entirely due to the extravagant living of the people, and to consequent bankruptcies, through which nearly a million a year is lost. Whilst readily admitting that extravagant living has caused a good many persons to drift irto the Bankruptcy Court, we must deny that the collective deficit of the bankrupts of the colony represents a dead loss, The money that has been lost to the bankrupt is not necessarily lost (o the community, for as a rule extravagance and bankruptcy mean nothing more nor less than too rapid circulation of capital by an individual, who in the end finds that his power of spending money is exhausted, and that his neighbours have all his property, In some eases the money so distributed may have been his own, and in others it may have belonged to other people, but that really does not matter. The man who trades while he has a deficit really creates so much fictitious capital, and when his estate is wound up the assets are realized, while the fictitious capital is struck off. The collective amount of the deficits of all the bankrupts in New Zealand can only be said to have been completely lost to the colony when a sum equal to it has been sent out of it, without an equivalent being leceived—a most improbable thing to happen.