Vigorous complaints have repeatedly been made about delays in payment in connection with the further deterioration in the market, and this has recently been increasing to an increasing extent.
The fact that these complaints come from all sorts of circles, even from those from whom one was not used to hearing them in the past, shows in any case that this is a more general phenomenon, in this case in the area of our currency has causes.
The slow payment complained of is not pre-war borrowing but a more or less deliberate delay in paying off debts.
The struggle against the borrowing economy, which in earlier times made itself felt particularly in handicrafts and small trade and which was always felt to be a cancerous damage to a healthy economy, was taken up with great determination at the time and with growing success, especially by the associations of the relevant groups of workers been led.
At that time, however, the blame for the unhealthy borrowing system was generally less on the debtor than on the creditor, and less on the recipient of the service to be paid than on the person who had performed it.
It was not uncommon for craftsmen, grocers and often doctors to send bills years later and only after frequent urging.
Today, as a rule, things are the other way around: the defaulter is not the supplier, but the recipient;
and he is usually in default not because he did not have the means to do so, but because he sees delaying payment as an advantage to himself.
Herein lies the essential economic motive of today's borrowing economy, if one still wants to use this expression, which is no longer entirely applicable to the phenomenon mentioned.
For the creditor, it used to be that he lost interest due to the delay in payment, that his claim was jeopardized under certain circumstances, that he had to send a reminder or even sue in order to get his money and, above all, that if he did not have sufficient equity, he was forced to seek credit from others or even to borrow from his own suppliers, and that, particularly in this last case, he deprived himself of the advantages enjoyed by his cash-buying competitor , thus becoming less competitive with him.
For the borrower, the main disadvantage was that under certain circumstances he bought more than he was economically able to afford, since he did not have to pay until later - it was often a bad business practice for the buyer to buy with this information tempted to do unnecessary things - that he gradually lost control of his economy and ended up in debt with all the great dangers that this might entail for him.
Even today it certainly still happens that suppliers and recipients borrow and allow themselves to be borrowed out of sloppiness or out of those thoughts mentioned above.
But that is much less the case today.
The delayed method of payment today is mostly based on the intention to make a profit from the hoped-for further deterioration in the market in the meantime, in other words: to get rid of one's obligation at a cost that has remained the same in terms of numbers but is economically lower.
Apart from the purely speculative moment, which of course can sometimes turn out to be unfavorable, there is the intention of direct damage to the recipient, which - the more the economic effects of the currency collapse are understood by simple minds - encounters increasing resistance.