Richard Kerschagl, Das Geld von heute (1949)

Kerschagl’s 1949 treatise develops a theory of money from the experience of war finance, rationing, blocked balances, inflation, black markets, and administrative allocation. Its central premise is that money cannot be understood as a timeless object with a fixed essence, but only as a function within a definite economic order.

das Geld ist ein Geschöpf der Wirtschaft und einer bestimmten Wirtschaftsform.

English translation: Money is a creature of the economy and of a particular form of economic organization.

From this starting point Kerschagl rereads the familiar problems of monetary theory—cash and deposits, credit creation, state power, purchasing power, exchange rates, quantity theory, gold, inflation, deflation, and reform. His question is not simply what money “is,” but what happens to it when the institutions that make it general, anonymous, and calculable are weakened.

The initial definition remains classical in form.

Das Geld von heute ist der Träger allgemeiner Kaufkraft und Zahlkraft in der arbeitsteiligen verkehrswirtschaftlichen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft.

English translation: The money of today is the bearer of general purchasing power and paying power within the exchange-based economic community founded on the division of labor.

Yet the postwar economy reveals that these functions can come apart. Money may retain legal payment power while losing general purchasing power. Ration cards, permits, price controls, coupons, occupational privileges, blocked accounts, and black-market channels all shift access to goods away from money as such and toward administrative entitlement. The same nominal unit can therefore have different practical force depending on who holds it, where it is used, and what channels of supply are available.

This is why planning changes money qualitatively rather than merely altering its quantity.

Jede Planwirtschaft — und dabei muß es sich noch keineswegs etwa um eine vollsozialisierte Wirtschaft handeln — ändert sofort grundlegend den Charakter des Geldes.

English translation: Every planned economy — and this need not by any means be a fully socialized economy — immediately alters the character of money in a fundamental way.

Kerschagl describes the result as a personalization of money. Its effective value comes to depend on ration category, social position, locality, allocation, and access. At the limit of full socialism, money ceases to be a universal medium and becomes a Rechenpfennig, an accounting sign within an allocation apparatus. The decisive loss is not only depreciation, but the erosion of general validity, anonymity, and confidence.

The same functional view shapes his account of modern credit money. Purchasing power is created not only by notes but by deposits, checks, fiduciary media, and bank credit. Inflationary pressure may therefore appear through the credit system as much as through cash issue. Central-bank policy cannot confine itself to metallic cover or note circulation, but must consider the whole structure of money creation and the purposes for which credit is used. Kerschagl accepts the state-theory insight that money belongs to a payment community, but rejects the notion that law can create real value at will. The state can declare legal tender, fix rates, tax, and regulate prices; it cannot abolish scarcity, production costs, foreign constraints, or the need for real capital calculation.

His monetary norm is consequently moral and epistemic as well as technical.

Richtige Geldpolitik bedeutet Klarheit und Wahrheit, vor allem Klarheit in der Geldschöpfung und Wahrheit in der Geldrechnung.

English translation: Sound monetary policy means clarity and truth—above all, clarity in the creation of money and truth in monetary accounting.

Money value must be analyzed in layers. Nominal validity, metallic value, exchange value, and purchasing power are distinct, and purchasing power itself is fragmented by taxation, deductions, transport costs, legal and illegal markets, rationing, and unequal access to goods. Exchange-rate policy likewise cannot be reduced to a mechanical parity. An overvalued currency sustains intervention and false accounting; an undervalued one risks dumping, capital loss, and sell-off. A stable rate is valuable only when it expresses a sustainable real economy.

Kerschagl’s critique of quantity theory follows the same logic. Equations relating money, velocity, goods, prices, and income may clarify formal relations, but they do not explain the quality of production, capital preservation, distribution of purchasing power, or the difference between military output and consumer supply. Monetary theory must therefore ask what credit finances and whether production is real, profitable, and socially durable.