If it be true that speculation, including all manner of readjustment to dynamic changes, makes up the overwhelming bulk of trade in the country, then Fisher's _indicia_ of variation in trade, weighted as they are, are totally misleading. The same is true of Kemmerer's _indicia_ of "growth of business."[283] These are: population, tonnage entered and cleared, exports and imports of merchandise, postal revenues, gross earnings of railways, freights carried by railways, receipts of the Western Union Co., consumption of pig iron, bituminous coal retained for consumption, consumption of wheat, consumption of corn, consumption of cotton, consumption of wool, consumption of wines and liquors, market values of reported sales on the New York Stock Exchange. Only the last of these is in any sense an index of speculation. It is swallowed up by being put on a par with the other fourteen items. Its influence on the final index, made by averaging the others is, as inspection shows, virtually _nil_. Out of the twenty-six years his figures cover, the general index moves counter to the share sales 14 times! Utterly random figures would have come nearer to the facts in the case. It is particularly striking that Professor Kemmerer, whose total figures, as Professor Fisher's, rest for their absolute magnitude on Kinley's investigation,[284] should assign 89% of his estimated trade (183 billions in 1890) to wholesale commodities,[285] (with 3% to wages, and 8% to securities), when Kinley's figures show that wholesale deposits are a minor fraction of the total!
The constancy in the figures of these two writers for trade from year to year, a general steady, upward growth, does indeed suggest that trade is determined "by physical capacities and technique," and that it does stand as a great, independent, inflexible factor, independent of money and deposits, constituting a real causal coefficient with them in determining prices. If, however, speculation is as big a factor as our analysis would indicate, then trade is a highly flexible thing, varying enormously from year to year, moved by a multiplicity of causes, among them _fluctuations_ in particular prices, and the ease and tightness in the money market--the quantity of money and deposits.