Last Forever, He Says in His Year's Message to Business. Get out of debt, wholly if possible, otherwise, reduce your indebtedness as much as possible. There is no reason why the wheel of fortune will not continue to turn for many generations as it has in the past. Panics and depressions may some day be eliminated, but little has yet been done to bring such a millennium about. The Federal Reserve system may have put banks in an impregnable position, but it has not changed human nature.
People are in debt today to an extent never before.
Sooner or later the dam will break, to be followed by unemployment, failures and hard times. However, we'll do our derndest, Roger, and thanks for giving us the idea. It always has seemed to us that what you say about service is the best or at least the safest policy to pursue. As the picture immediately shows, Babson's sense of high levels of debt in 1929 were quite correct with the ratio of total debt to GDP of just over 1.6 times in 1928. And, we reached this same level of indebtedness again in 1979, and have exceeded it to a ratio of 2.3 as of 1990.