According to the calculations on which the Economist "Index Number" is based—an Index Number is an attempt to arrive at the aggregate wholesale price of important representative commodities—prices in July 1925 were just double their average level in the first five years of the present century, having been in the meantime, in March 1920 when the zenith of the after-war rise was reached, nearly four times as high.[1] So that anyone who bought Consols in the early years of the century and hoped to receive a steady income from them, got the income but found that when he turned it into goods its power to purchase them was not much more than a quarter, in March 1920, of what it had been when he bought; and finds now that it is only about half as potent in supplying him with the good things of life.
He feels, probably, that he has been somehow infernally swindled, but that it was all owing to the war and could not be helped, as to which he may or may not be right. But we are not concerned with his feelings, but only with the fact that the same depreciation of money by over-issue, which has applied those "abhorred shears" to the real value of his income, has had
- ↑ The exact figures are: 1901-5, 2,200; March, 1920, 8,352; July, 1925, 4,446.
