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It is nearly nil. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter.

Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars.

It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful.

But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more.

Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise.

Audits are penetrating and meticulous.

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Commercial morality is enormously improved. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market.

What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune.

The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost.

The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months.

The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present.

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So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism.

It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound. There was no safety net below citizens, no unemployment insurance or Social Security.

Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account. A bubble can easily be punctured.

But to incise it with a needle so that it subsides gradually is a task of no small delicacy. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.