Success Quote by John Moody

A chill runs through Moody's sentence because it treats catastrophe not as a surprise but as a timetable. "Consequently" does the heavy lifting: he's not forecasting with mystic flair, he's claiming the logic is already baked in. Overcapitalized railroad empires, swollen with debt and fixed costs, don't need a scandal or a flood to wobble; they just need the economy to exhale. "Bid fair" is the genteel mask over a blunt warning: the odds are good they'll crack.

The specific intent is investor-facing and managerial at once. Moody is diagnosing a structural vulnerability in the era's signature industry, a business that looked like destiny because it looked like infrastructure. Railroads were the high-tech platforms of their day: essential, ubiquitous, and financed with exuberant confidence. Heavy capitalization means leverage, optimistic valuations, and a cost base that can't shrink as fast as revenues. When "general business" falls off, the rails still need maintenance, interest payments still come due, payroll still hits. The subtext is a rebuke of boom-time storytelling: growth isn't proof of health if it's purchased with obligations that only good times can service.

Context matters. Moody came of age in a U.S. economy marked by cyclical panics and railroad reorganizations, where consolidation and speculative finance were common and downturns exposed the difference between scale and resilience. His phrasing anticipates modern stress-testing: the real test of a system isn't how it performs in expansion, but how quickly it breaks when demand turns.