It's a traditional euphemism, this so-called "work of depressions", in which the supposed dead wood of unproductive, tied up capital is cut out of the economy, after accumulating because of lax lending. The rhetoric of work pictures a reborn economy rising from the ashes, more efficient, with uppity workers chastened by their lengthy idleness, inflation quelled, managers more attentive to the balance sheet and the right of their shareholders to a return on their capital, and the bankers sobered up and rededicated to sound lending practices. But this serves to hide another picture: depressions crush the value of assets like real estate, (commercial real estate has taken a haircut down to around the mid calf level) and drive weaker businesses into bankruptcy even as labor, the weakest player, is driven to the edge of survival. Credit dries up for all but the strongest. In short, depressions are the PERFECT scenario for businesses and individuals with the deepest pockets to drive competitors out of existence and to snap up assets of all kinds at pennies on the dollar. Nothing is surer in a depression than that the rich will get comparatively richer, and through their unique access to credit during hard times and due to the generalized distress of all strata below them, they will use the crisis to position themselves to extend their lead when the business cycle resets. They always end up owning a greater share of the available assets at the end of the bust than they did at the beginning. The rich employ the euphemism of the supposedly sanitary efficiency restoring "work" of depressions and busts when addressing the rest of us. However among themselves they employ a different saying: depressions ensure that "Wealth reverts to its rightful owners."

There's more to it than a Northern European Protestant ethic of punishing loose behavior, although I wouldn't deny that this also fuels the censorious and superior attitude of the finger wagging Germans. Whole countries are being repossessed and looted --or are in danger of it-- the way Bain took over and looted businesses.

out of the system, so the rich could pick off the competition and pick up the cheap assets.

"Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate; It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people..."


"Enterprising people" being people like the mellons. Who are still very rich, as they are so damned enterprising.

"In a depression money returns to its rightful owners."

They bleed us every twenty years or so & bleed us to death once in every generation.