Lederer’s essay recasts crisis theory as a morphology of disproportions: not a search for one privileged cause, but an inquiry into which mismatches become cyclical forms. Against monocausal accounts of harvests, gold, credit, saving, prices, or investment, he argues that endogenous crisis theory tends toward one logical structure:
letzten Endes jede ökonomische, endogene Krisentheorie irgendwie in eine Disproportionalitätstheorie ausmünden muß.
English translation: ultimately, every economic, endogenous theory of crisis must in some way culminate in a theory of disproportionality.
His point is not eclecticism. If crises arise from internal maladjustments, then policy must identify the specific forms in which maladjustment becomes cumulative. Spiethoff’s capital shortage, monetary disturbances, and investment errors all name different disproportions between production, income, circulation, and demand.
Lederer’s own explanation begins from unequal elasticity. In expansion, raw materials, intermediate goods, final goods, wages, salaries, interest, and profits do not move together. The decisive asymmetry is distributive: profits rise faster than mass and fixed incomes, so accumulation requires a relative shift of the social product away from immediate consumption, even when real wages increase. Banks amplify this movement by directing credit toward branches where profit chances seem highest; technical innovation further intensifies unevenness by creating differential gains and devaluing older capital.
Yet disproportionality alone is not crisis. Capitalism is always uneven, and ordinary discrepancies may be corrected by price changes, capital movements, and altered consumption. Crisis begins when these corrective mechanisms are blocked or delayed:
Das heißt es müssen Kräfte wirksam sein, welche ihren Ausgleich sehr lange hemmen.
English translation: That is to say, forces must be at work which for a very long time obstruct their equalization.
This leads to Lederer’s central distinction. Prosperity and depression are both disproportional, but they differ in how price changes affect income streams. In the upswing, credit-created purchasing power accumulates in producers’ hands and flows toward means of production, generating acceleration and encouraging investment at inflated valuations. But a boom is not merely monetary expansion: saving, technical change, population growth, and reorganization of production all matter. Credit is necessary for the conjuncture’s momentum, but insufficient to secure balanced growth. For this reason, stabilization of the price level cannot abolish crises; the deeper problem is proportional development.
Der Unterschied liegt meines Erachtens in der Auswirkung dieser Preisänderungen auf die Einkommensströme.
English translation: The difference, in my view, lies in the effect of these price changes on the flows of income.
The key rigidity is the difference between goods-market adjustment and income adjustment. If grain and meat prices diverge, production and consumption can shift. But if wages and fixed incomes lag behind profits, workers cannot withdraw labor in proportion to their reduced income share; their need to sell labor may even increase. Thus distributive disproportions do not call forth the same equilibrating response as commodity disproportions. They become cumulative through the cycle: profits in the boom finance further producer demand, while in depression profits collapse, unemployment destroys mass purchasing power, and capital values must be written off.
Eine Diskrepanz der Einkommen aber löst keine Gegenbewegung im Angebot der Arbeitskräfte aus.
English translation: A discrepancy in incomes, however, triggers no counter-movement in the supply of labor.
The final section turns this morphology into a critique of simple credit remedies. Producers demand state or bank support as though idle labor and capital could be reactivated by lending alone. Lederer allows that credit might help if the exact location and magnitude of disproportions were known and if demand could be created in the necessary channels. But producer credit by itself does not generate the final purchasing power needed to realize output; consumer credit, meanwhile, risks financing consumption without creating repayment capacity. His conclusion is therefore institutional as much as monetary: crises are technical, distributive, financial, and organizational disturbances of growth, and noninflationary stabilization would require a degree of coordinated planning beyond the ordinary banking system.
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