Excerpt from The Masters of Capital: A Chronicle of Wall Street Naturally, this modern practice of preempting or capitalizing probabilities was overdone. Such a process inevitably invited speculation; and boom periods, with recurring lapses and setbacks, became characteristic of the times. Eventually, the capi talists learned that this new capital, which repre sented not only accumulated wealth and current earnings but the future possible earning power of the community generally, must be bolstered up and insured by some artificial process. So long as nor mal growth in population and industry continued. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.