Richard Reisch · 1937
Richard Reisch’s 1937 Das Problem des zwischenstaatlichen Zahlungsverkehrs is a policy-theoretical pamphlet: the expanded synopsis of lectures held in Brünn, Olmütz, and Reichenberg, followed by a Ružička/Reisch memorandum, draft concession and statutes for Außenhandelsbanken, a Valutenbon form, and a model credit contract. Its thesis is that international payments failed when the legal-moral expectation of stable money was broken; a gradual cure must rebuild trusted payment promises and compensations rather than rely on devaluation, embargo, or ordinary clearing.
So erwies sich der Goldstandard als die wichtigste Stütze des Welthandels, er bildete sozusagen seine gemeinsame Sprache und erleichterte die Verständigung, indem er die Überzeugung des realen Wertes des Geldes und seiner Wertbeständigkeit aufrechterhielt.
English translation: Thus the gold standard proved to be the most important support of world trade; it formed, so to speak, its common language and facilitated understanding by maintaining the conviction of the real value of money and its stability of value.
The opening history of exchange, gold coin, banknotes, and deposit clearing is not antiquarian. Reisch uses it to show that modern payments rested on substitutes—receipts, banknotes, bank transfers—but only because these were believed to represent real, stable values. His core conceptual distinction is between elastic note issue against commercial bills and note issue for permanent state finance. The former prevents deflation during expanding trade; the latter is the wartime and postwar abuse he names pernicious inflation.
Die durch die Emission fiduziärer Banknoten ermöglichte elastische Gestaltung der Geldzirkulation ist daher für das Wirtschaftsleben von größter Bedeutung.
English translation: The elastic shaping of money circulation made possible by the emission of fiduciary banknotes is therefore of the greatest importance for economic life.
That distinction drives his polemic against modern money and credit theories. Against Keynes’s nominal unit of account and Hahn’s bank-credit creation from nothing, Reisch insists that credit is a transfer of real command over goods and that clearing saves cash but does not create value. Note-bank credit must be short circulation credit, not disguised public debt.
Die Vermengung der Begriffe Zahlungsmittel und Kreditbefriedigungsmittel erweist sich jedoch als verhängnisvoll: Geld ist wohl Gegenstand der Gewährung von Kredit, Kredit aber ist kein geeignetes Mittel, beliebig viel neues Geld zu schaffen.
English translation: The conflation of the concepts of means of payment and means of satisfying credit proves to be disastrous: money is indeed an object of the granting of credit, but credit is not a suitable means for creating arbitrary amounts of new money.
The international section translates this monetary argument into a diagnosis of the 1930s. By abandoning gold, world trade lost its common language; import restrictions, export drives, currency controls, and bilateral clearings become mutually destructive. Reisch notes his own role in promoting clearing contracts, but calls them palliatives because they cannot ensure timely settlement or prevent clearing peaks. The needed elements are specially covered value-confirmations, usable compensation possibilities, and an enforceable equilibrium of payments.
The constructive proposal, devised with Ernst Ružička, is a transitional system among economically connected states. Each creates an Außenhandelsbank issuing specially covered Valutabons/Valutenbons on reciprocal credits in stable foreign currency or gold value. A-coupons fund state-favored imports or payments; B-coupons fund tolerated additional imports, sold with an agio treated as prepaid customs duty. If one country imports too little and its partner’s claims threaten to freeze, the B-coupon agio is lowered, effectively granting customs relief to stimulate imports from the debtor. This rests on Reisch’s reversal of export fetishism:
Im Außenhandel liegt nämlich der volkswirtschaftliche Vorteil in den Importen, die der nationalen Wirtschaft Güter zuführen, und nicht in den Exporten, die der heimischen Wirtschaft Güter entziehen: Export ist nicht Selbstzweck, sondern nur Mittel zum Zweck, nämlich das Mittel zur Bezahlung der Importe und sonstigen Verpflichtungen gegenüber dem Ausland; daher kommt der Einräumung der Importmöglichkeit aus dem Auslande oft die gleiche Bedeutung zu wie der Eröffnung von Exportmöglichkeiten nach dem Auslande.
English translation: In foreign trade, the economic advantage lies in imports, which supply the national economy with goods, and not in exports, which withdraw goods from the domestic economy: export is not an end in itself but only a means to an end, namely the means of paying for imports and other obligations toward foreign countries; hence the granting of import opportunities from abroad often carries the same significance as the opening of export opportunities to foreign markets.
The memorandum and appendices turn this into legal machinery: concession, provisional statutes, monthly bank reporting, full-cover rules, gold accounting, a sample Valutenbon, and a bilateral credit contract. The system is initially supplementary and facultative, but can become multilateral through a common clearing office and ultimately expand into Globalkompensation. Its organizing principle is named in the statutes:
Leistungskompensation im Sinne dieser Statuten ist die wertmäßige Übereinstimmung zwischenstaatlicher Forderungen und Verpflichtungen durch vertragsmäßige Begünstigung der Ausfuhr jener Länder, deren Verpflichtungen die Forderungen übersteigen.
English translation: Performance compensation within the meaning of these statutes is the value-based reconciliation of interstate claims and liabilities through the contractual favoring of exports from those countries whose liabilities exceed their claims.
The work’s relevance lies in this hybrid: hard-money moralism joined to technocratic trade banking. Reisch is not simply demanding prewar restoration; he tries to internationalize the fiduciary banknote under gold-value safeguards, using bank automation and customs flexibility to loosen trade barriers, stabilize currencies, and reduce the economic frictions threatening European peace.
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