Felix Somary, Schlußwort von Dr. Felix Somary-Zürich

Felix Somary’s closing intervention at the 1924 meeting, originally published in 1925 and republished in 2022, clarifies his positions in a debate on monetary theory, central banking, reparations, and German inflation. Organized as replies to individual speakers, it culminates in a policy argument: wartime and postwar monetary expansion was not an unavoidable alternative to state collapse; stronger taxation and substantially tighter discount policy offered alternatives. A secretary’s note explains that Somary’s preceding printed report came from a separate manuscript, so the discussion and closing remarks do not correspond to it at every point.

Somary first defends his account of the Bank of France’s resistance to state intervention, then challenges Bräuer’s claims about access to gold balance sheets and their usefulness for calculations when payments were made in marks. His criticism of Reichsbank practice links monetary instability to the handling of credit rather than treating it as a purely theoretical problem. Against Bräuer’s objection to his invocation of quantity theory, he exposes the contested boundaries of theoretical authority:

Meine Herren, jeder einzelne Geldtheoretiker hat seine eigene Quantitätstheorie und nennt jede andere naiv.

English translation: Gentlemen, every single monetary theorist has his own quantity theory and calls every other one naive.

The recorded laughter and assent underline the polemical force of the remark. Yet Somary also narrows his claims. Answering Bortkiewicz, he affirms his esteem for Knapp while specifying that his objection concerns Knapp’s lack of interest in money’s value, not the acceptance of money by state treasuries. The conceptual distinction is between explaining money’s institutional status and addressing its purchasing power.

His reply to Eucken similarly separates agreement on economic mechanisms from uncertainty about political choices. Somary accepts that an agent demanding foreign exchange would have to exert discount pressure, but questions whether France would permit that course. He instead envisages reparations funds financing purchases in Germany through arrangements involving foreign central banks and importers. The issue is how the administration of reparations could translate financial claims into effective demand for German goods.

The final reply rejects the framing of inflationary finance as a necessity of state survival:

Es wäre gar nicht notwendig gewesen, während des ganzen Krieges lediglich mit der Notenpresse zu arbeiten.

English translation: It would not have been at all necessary to work merely with the printing press throughout the whole war.

Somary recalls demands for a capital levy and stringent fiscal measures already raised in a 1915 internal inquiry by the Verein für Sozialpolitik. He allows that monetary financing may have been necessary immediately after the war, but argues that intensive taxation could subsequently have replaced it. Discount policy supplies his sharpest example of an inadequate response:

Jedermann sagte sich doch, man hätte nicht von 7 auf 8, sondern auf eine ganz andere Zahl, vielleicht auf 30%, erhöhen müssen.

English translation: Everyone said to himself, after all, that one ought to have raised it not from 7 to 8, but to a quite different figure, perhaps to 30%.

The tentative figure illustrates the scale of action he considered necessary, rather than establishing a worked-out rate prescription. The intervention’s significance lies in its movement from theoretical clarification to institutional responsibility: inflation appears as a process sustained by fiscal and central-bank decisions, whose alternatives Somary insists contemporaries had already identified.