Note 106 — Chapter II
Bernard Miall translation
M. Alfred Neymarck has shown how broken a reed is any argument based upon the amount of debt per inhabitant, and how void of any scientific basis.
“We have successively passed in review the various countries of Europe, and by basing our arguments upon facts and exact figures we think we have demonstrated that in the evaluation of a nation’s credit, of the price of its stocks and their rate of capitalisation, the figure ‘per inhabitant’ has no value and no significance. Such statistics, which are more or less used everywhere, in France and abroad, by force of habit and routine, are absolutely incorrect and incomplete; they have only one sure result: they infect the spirit of judgment of those who rely on them.”—In the journal Le Rentier, for the 7th, 17th, and 27th of September and the 7th of October 1904.