These developments greatly facilitated the forecasting of failure. In particular, they supported the spread of ratio analysis, a ‘second order’ set of calculations that were made possible by the greater availability and increasing uniformity of financial information that began to occur from the late 1890s. The current ratio – current assets divided by current liabilities – gained acceptance at this time, for it allowed creditors to predict the likelihood that a firm would fail as a result of inability to meet payments (Horrigan, 1968, p. 285). Banks began to rely heavily on this ratio as a basis for approving loans (Dev, 1974). The ‘50 per cent rule’ was widely touted – this dictated that a borrower’s current liabilities should not exceed 50 per cent of current assets. The NACM’s Bulletin set out similar guidelines in 1902, and in 1905 James Cannon, president of the Fourth National Bank of New York, and an early president of the NACM, recommended a set of ratios in a paper to the New Jersey Bankers Association (Cannon, 1905).