...Maybe it's not.

Graph #3 from this morning's post:

It shows loans and investments increasing faster than investments alone, until about 1980.

Again: It shows loans increasing faster than investments, until about 1980. But it doesn't really say what happened. Maybe loans didn't increase at all, while investments actually declined. Could be.

Actually, yesterday's Graph #2 shows that both investments and loans grew almost non-stop. So we know it's *not* true that "loans didn't increase at all". And we know it's *not* true that investments actually declined. But we don't know that from Graph #3.

Taking Graph #2 from this morning's post and transforming the vertical scale to a Natural Logarithm gives us this:

Basically, two parallel lines since 1970. Before that, the blue line (investment) roughly flat through the 1950s, then increasing (but slowly) through the 1960s.

The dates don't match up with dates from the earlier post. But it just shows that changes were in the works even before 1967.

I am reminded of the distinction between investment and speculation, and suspect that what some would call speculation is shown in the graph as investment.