Verkehrserschwerungen verteuern das Bankgeschäft

The file is a brief single-author journal intervention. In this 1924 banking article, Schumpeter asks how Austrian law can protect customers' securities without making ordinary custody, pledge, and clearing operations more expensive. Public anger over abuses is justified, but he refuses legislation by indignation: the difficult question is not whether to protect depositors, but how to do so without turning protection into costly formalism.

Aber die Frage, wie das geschehen kann, bleibt dessen ungeachtet schwierig.

English translation: But the question of how this can be done nonetheless remains a difficult one.

His argument proceeds by distinctions. A bank's self-serving use of entrusted property must be separated from administrative handling that merely simplifies safekeeping and management. The older rule treated the first as embezzlement; capitalist money and deposit banking then changed expectations, because depositors no longer demand the very banknotes they handed over, only repayment. Schumpeter cautiously applies that shift to fungible securities: the customer's protected interest is return of an equivalent quantity, not preservation of identical paper.

Nun liegen die Dinge bei der Deponierung von anderen vertretbaren Sachen zwar nicht ganz so, aber dennoch beschränkt sich das schutzwürdige Interesse des Deponenten auch in ihrem Falle darauf, daß er jederzeit ebenso viel der gleichen Gattung zurückerhalten kann.

English translation: Now with the deposit of other fungible goods matters do not stand quite the same way, but even so the depositor's legitimate interest is likewise confined to being able to receive back at any time the same quantity of the same kind.

The article's examples—a copy of Die Börse left at a kiosk and 100 Alpinen deposited at a bank—translate the doctrine into ordinary practice. If equivalent securities can be returned at any time and the claim is not endangered, insistence on the same numbered certificates is a nuisance, not a substantive right. Deposit law should therefore secure separation in bankruptcy and prohibit dealings that threaten recovery, rather than fetishize serial numbers.

Der Sieg der Depotgesetzgebung aller Länder ist denn auch nicht der, dem Deponenten die Rückstellung gerade derselben Nummern zu garantieren.

English translation: The triumph of the deposit legislation of all countries has accordingly not consisted in guaranteeing the depositor the return of the very same serial numbers.

From this legal point Schumpeter moves to institutional design. He warns against copying foreign statutes, since each financial centre has its own infrastructure and Vienna's Giro- und Kassenverein gives it an unusually effective system of securities clearing. Rules requiring separate storage, number lists, and rigid individualized ownership could damage precisely the institutions that keep transactions cheap.

Bei ihrer Beantwortung muß man von den Verhältnissen jedes Platzes ausgehen, weshalb das Abschreiben fremder Gesetzesbestimmungen, wie auch in anderen Fällen, so in diesem, nicht die richtige Art der Schöpfung neuen Rechtes ist.

English translation: In answering it one must proceed from the conditions of each locality, which is why the copying of foreign statutory provisions, in this case as in others, is not the right way to create new law.

The cost point is not incidental. Extra formal safeguards must be administered, booked, stored, and paid for; in the end they reappear as dearer banking conditions.

Übrigens würde auch das eine Verteuerung der Konditionen zur Folge haben, denn alle die unproduktive Arbeit, die mit der Anlage der Nummernverzeichnisse, mit der separaten Aufbewahrung der Effekten usw. verbunden ist, muß ja bezahlt werden.

English translation: Moreover, this too would entail a rise in the cost of banking conditions, for all the unproductive work associated with drawing up number registers, with the separate safekeeping of securities, and so on, must after all be paid for.

His preferred technique is selective prohibition: name the depositary powers that are dangerous, attach strong consequences to violations, and spare business forms that are established and commercially accepted. The decisive case is repledging encumbered customer securities. Forbidding it outright would narrow the credit capacity of smaller private bankers and push costs outward.

Wollte man auch das unmöglich machen, so würde man besonders dem kleineren Privatbankier sein Geschäft, mithin die Kreditgewährung, erschweren und so auf eine Verteuerung der Bankkonditionen hinarbeiten.

English translation: If one were to make this too impossible, one would especially render the smaller private banker's business, and thus the granting of credit, more difficult, and would thereby work towards a more costly set of banking terms.

The same reasoning supports collective administration of securities of the same kind, including combination with the bank's own holdings where the customer's recoverable share remains safe. Schumpeter's conceptual move is to bend civil-law categories toward the economic function of custody: a right in a variable quota of a mass deposit can protect the customer better, and more cheaply, than a theatrical insistence on numbered pieces. The piece is therefore neither anti-regulatory nor merely pro-bank; it is a plea for technically exact regulation that protects claims while preserving clearing, credit, and low transaction costs.

Die gesetzestechnische Aufgabe, die sich also ergeben würde, wäre natürlich schwieriger als die einfache Dekretierung des Festhaltens des Eigentums an individuellen Nummern, aber sie wäre nicht unlösbar.

English translation: The legislative-technical task that would thus arise would of course be more difficult than the simple decreeing of the retention of ownership in individual serial numbers, but it would not be insoluble.