"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass
consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing
wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with
buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the
nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of
distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an
increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as
capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of
mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective
demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their
capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game
where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other
fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran
out, the game stopped."
Eccles, Marriner S. 1951. Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal
Recollections (New York: Alfred A. Knopf): p. 76
Sounds like something out of Paul Sweezy's "The Theory of Capitalist
Development".
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