Felix Somary’s Bankpolitik is a systematic banking-policy treatise, not a narrow technical manual. Its scope runs from the definition of the bank and the logic of credit to the organization of banking systems, concentration, state policy, and the macroeconomic place of banks; appendices add legal and bibliographic orientation. Its main thesis is that banking must be understood from the liability side—from the bank’s dependence on confidence—rather than from the more usual emphasis on credit creation or lending technique.
Somary’s decisive conceptual reversal appears at the outset: the bank is not first a lender but an institution that receives credit from the public. This definition makes bank policy a doctrine of trust, liquidity, and maturity discipline.
Ich möchte demnach als Banken Institute bezeichnen, deren Zweck es ist Kredit zu nehmen.
English translation: I would accordingly designate as banks those institutions whose purpose is to take credit.
From this follows his critique of theories that make banks autonomous creators of credit. Banks do not command confidence; they administer it. Their power is therefore derivative, fragile, and politically significant.
Darum gehen auch alle die Lehren fehl, die die Gewährung oder gar die Schaffung von Kredit in den Mittelpunkt der Bankdoktrin stellen, denn die Banken sind nicht Herren, sondern Diener des öffentlichen Vertrauens.
English translation: For this reason all doctrines that place the granting or even the creation of credit at the center of banking theory go astray, for banks are not masters but servants of public confidence.
The image that sharpens the argument is Somary’s warning about borrowed liquidity. Industry and commerce may use credit as if it were their own resource, but its withdrawal is governed by the psychology of depositors and markets, not by the borrower’s need. Bank policy must therefore anticipate the moment when credit is most needed and least available.
Der Industrielle wie der Kaufmann dürfen aus einem Glas trinken, das ihnen nicht gehört; aber es wird ihnen nicht selten gerade in dem Augenblick fortgenommen, in dem sie den stärksten Durst verspüren.
English translation: The industrialist, like the merchant, may drink from a glass that does not belong to him; but it is not seldom taken from him at the very moment when he feels the strongest thirst.
The work’s structure develops this insight through a classification of credit. Somary does not treat legal form or collateral as decisive; the real criterion is economic liquidity. Mortgage credit may appear secure because of land registration, long maturity, and Pfandbrief-style matching, yet it can become dangerous through inflated valuations or through institutions—such as savings banks and insurers—holding assets whose liquidity does not match their liabilities. The same logic governs building credit, which occupies an unstable intermediate position because it finances an asset whose future completion is the source of repayment.
Der Baukredit hält die Mitte zwischen Geldmarkt- und Kapitalmarktkredit.
English translation: Construction credit occupies a middle position between money-market credit and capital-market credit.
Somary’s most important move in the capital-market section is to define investment credit by the borrower’s balance-sheet substance rather than by contract type. A credit becomes Anlagekredit when it exceeds the borrower’s liquid assets and is therefore exposed to the enterprise itself.
Als Anlagekredit bezeichnen wir einen an ein Unternehmen erteilten Kredit, dessen Höhe über das Maß der liquiden Aktiven hinausgeht.
English translation: By investment credit we designate a credit granted to an enterprise whose amount exceeds the measure of its liquid assets.
This is the bridge between banking and entrepreneurship. Such credit may be formally debt, but economically it participates in business risk. Somary’s formulation dissolves the clean legal boundary between creditor and shareholder: the bank that finances illiquid enterprise becomes a bearer of entrepreneurial uncertainty.
Der Anlagekredit ist somit eine Beteiligung am Unternehmerrisiko in Kreditform.
English translation: Investment credit is thus a participation in entrepreneurial risk in the form of credit.
The relevance of Bankpolitik lies in this insistence that banking crises arise less from isolated bad loans than from mismatches among confidence, liquidity, maturity, and institutional form. Somary’s account is accordingly both microeconomic and macroeconomic: it studies concrete instruments—mortgages, building loans, investment credits—while asking how banks transmit disturbances through the whole economy. His discussion of concentration and state policy extends the same principle: the organization of banking cannot be judged merely by efficiency or scale, because banks intermediate public confidence and can convert private errors into systemic strain.
As a 1930 work, Bankpolitik stands at the threshold of modern crisis analysis. It resists both romantic suspicion of banks and celebratory theories of credit creation. Its central claim is more severe: banking is a public function performed by private institutions whose freedom depends on liquidity discipline. The bank’s art is not simply to expand credit but to know which credits remain compatible with the confidence on which the bank itself lives.
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