Sound Familiar?

Well, not exactly, but still...

And then Lodz was suddenly at a standstill.

The city was like a hoggish gormandizer who goes on stuffing himself with food long after he has eaten all he needs, who goes on eating with the aid of artificial stimulants to his appetite, till he reaches the point of exhaustion and immobility and can go no further before the stomach-pump has done its work. Lodz had the indigestion of over-production.

There were not only the great factories, with their two steady shifts; there were the smaller mills, the tiny ones, the hole-in-the-wall and hand-loom factories, the subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, all of them turning out textiles steadily. And everything was done on credit, by means of promissory notes.

Notes provided the dowry when the son and daughter of two manufacturing families were led under the canopy. The young man simply endorsed his father-in-law's note,, and so obtained his first supplies of cotton and wool. He gave the cotton and wool to some contractors to turn into fabrics and papid for the work with more notes. The contractor endorsed the notes and issued little notes of his own to the workers. The workers put their unreadable signatures oln the little notes and used them for bread, potatoes, clothes, and rent.

In the same way there came from the villages little shopkeepers, business-men, sons-in-law just starting out on their own, and bought bales of goods for which they left behind their notes. The sellers did not ask for cash, for while the merry-go-round worked, notes were not examined; they were regarded as the equivalent of currency. And so workers, servants, teachers, all, were accustomed to the Lodz habit of notes. Contributions to charities, pledges in the synagogue, payments for big paraties in the expensive restaurants--all notes. And there was no control. No one knew how much Lodz needed, whether in the way of factories or restaurants, of workers or of gay ladies in cabarets. There was an insane unreality and baselessness in the activity in the city. Whoever was clever, glib, and shameless, whoever could catch the mood of frantic and uncalculating paper-exchanging, set processes in motion, got his raaake-off, and let the rest go to the devil. ...

And then suddenly everything stopped. A large bite stuck in the throat of the hoggish city. The mad eating and guzzling was at an end. The cleansing process was about to begin. ...

--I. J. Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi 293- (Maurice Samuel trans. 1966).

H/T: Joseph Epstein. I don't suppose I ever would have discovered this treasure without him.