Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Die Zukunft des Geldes (1922)

Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s signed journal review examines Elemér Hantos’s account of European monetary reconstruction after the war. Its opening correction establishes the book’s actual scope: despite its title, it concerns the future of European monetary standards over the next ten years, rather than the future of money generally. Schwiedland then moves from Hantos’s diagnosis of monetary weakness to the currency arrangements available to weaker economies, concluding with a distinction between agreement on policy and disagreement over classification.

Hantos’s commitment to sound banking does not imply an immediate restoration of the gold standard. In Schwiedland’s account, inflation has so disrupted European monetary conditions that a renewed gold standard must await gold’s return to freely traded commodity status. The explanation of currency weakness also extends beyond excessive paper issuance. Hantos includes slower circulation associated with rising commodity prices, wartime destruction, transport difficulties, shortages of machinery and raw materials, inadequate labor, and high production costs. These obstacles diminish the supply of exportable goods and hence foreign demand for European currencies. Monetary recovery consequently requires intervention on both sides of the relationship between currency and production:

The most important thing is, however, to get rid of the disparity between currency and goods, by contracting the former and increasing the latter.

The review’s final paragraph considers two intermediate arrangements. A “gold-nucleus currency” retains a gold stock without allowing free conversion of notes into gold. A “gold-bill of exchange currency” instead holds foreign payment instruments payable in countries whose currencies have a gold basis. Both accommodate economies unable to sustain full gold convertibility. Schwiedland nevertheless classifies these arrangements as forms of paper currency, referring to his own earlier pamphlet. Gold reserves or claims on gold-based countries do not, in his terminology, make them equivalent to freely convertible currency.

That conceptual reservation leaves substantial practical agreement:

For the rest I agree with the author that the main object of the weak countries must be to attain such a level of value of their currency as is moderately stable, and to increase their industrial, agricultural and mining production, and their exports.

The review’s significance lies in linking monetary stabilization to productive recovery while distinguishing limited gold backing from convertibility. Moderate currency stability, expanded output, and stronger exports constitute the attainable program for weaker states; restoration of a gold standard remains a conditional prospect, not an immediate remedy.