the immensely rapid advance

in the exploitation of American economic resources has meant throughout the history of the United States, despite recurrent crises, a prospect of very high profits for the successful business adventurer, and this prospect has bred in the American people a speculative temper of a kind that exists nowhere else in anything like the same degree.

this temper has contributed greatly to the instability of the American business system and has exaggerated its repercussions on the rest of the world.