THE ECONOMY OF NOW OR THE ECONOMY OF NOWHERE? HERE ? NOW? NOWHERE? NOWHERE NOW? NOW NOWHERE? HEREWOLF ECONOMY MADE EASY BY H.G.WELLS WITH EXTRA BELL'S AND PORK BELLIES

The Phase of Economy is really a misnomer. 

 There was really no economy;

 there was strangulation and inaction through a cessation
of expenditure. 

Nobody--unless it was a dexterous speculator on a
falling market--grew richer, or even relatively richer.  The only
profits appeared in bank balance sheets.  As the malady of arrest
spread, traffics declined, enterprise died out, borrowing states
and corporations suspended payments, and these children of good
fortune, these well-off people, found themselves confronted at the
same time by a suspension of payments and more and more urgent
charitable appeals. 

Their bankers and solicitors informed them
that first this trusted prop and then that was in arrears or in
default. 

The waters of repudiation rose, submerging security after
security.  If they sold out and hoarded, some fluctuation in
exchange might still engulf great fractions of their capital.
"Whatever else may be falling off, sleepless nights are on the
increase," a financial paper remarked in 1933.  The head full of
self-reproach that tossed on the crumpled pillow in the villa
marked time with the fretting of the unemployed who worried in the
stuffy cold of the slum.

We have the Diary of Titus Cobbett, who rode on a bicycle from Rome
and along the Riviera to Bordeaux in 1958.  He had begun life as an
art dealer, and had served the British Inland Revenue for some
years as a valuer of furniture, pictures and the like. 

His tour
seems to have been a journey of curiosity.  He complains bitterly
of the difficulty of changing money between Genoa and Bordeaux. 

 He
seems to have had some obscure diplomatic or consular function, but
of that he is too discreet to speak.  Perhaps he was sent to make a
report, but if so there is no record of his instructions.