Felix Somary’s lecture, delivered on 14 September 1928 and published in 1929, examines international capital movements from the combined perspectives of economist and banker. The supplied German republication has no documented publication year. Its central distinction is between the recovery of capital resources after the war and the failure to restore an effective international financial order. Somary connects this transformation to speculation, industrial expansion, and the political insecurity of foreign assets.
The opening humorously challenges attempts to classify him through opposed political labels:
Nun möchte ich doch für den Beurteiler vorausschicken, daß in meinem Falle Vater und Sohn identisch sind, daß es mir also ziemlich schwer fallen dürfte, gleichzeitig äußerst links und äußerst rechts zu sein.
English translation: Now I should nevertheless like to state in advance, for the benefit of whoever is to judge, that in my case father and son are identical, so that it would presumably be rather difficult for me to be at one and the same time extremely on the left and extremely on the right.
The more consequential tension concerns his professional roles:
Es ist allerdings viel leichter, ebenso äußerst links wie äußerst rechts zu sein, als gleichzeitig Nationalökonom und Bankier zu sein.
English translation: It is admittedly much easier to be both extremely on the left and extremely on the right than to be at the same time an economist and a banker.
For Somary, the banker cannot postpone judgment until historical distance makes events intelligible: decisions must anticipate developments, and clients immediately experience their financial consequences. This practical constraint explains the lecture’s combination of structural analysis and provisional forecasts.
Somary first asks whether the war marked an epochal break or a temporary interruption in capital-market development. His Swiss vantage point supports a qualified recovery thesis:
Wir würden aber, wenn wir die Dinge von der Schweiz aus ansehen, viel eher dazu neigen, den Krieg nur als eine Episode zu betrachten.
English translation: We would, however, if we view things from Switzerland, be much more inclined to regard the war merely as an episode.
France’s renewed capacity to export capital, including purchases of German securities after the loss of Russia as a principal borrower, suggests that financial connections can outlast political antagonisms. Germany’s difficulties are greater, but Somary also anticipates the consolidation of its political indebtedness. His optimism concerns capital-market activity, not the disappearance of institutional or diplomatic obstacles.
The recovery of funds does not restore prewar coordination. The Bank of England formerly influenced international commerce through discount policy and its leverage over raw-material trade. Its supremacy has ended without an equivalent successor: the Federal Reserve chiefly serves a continental domestic economy. Somary therefore separates the availability of money from markets’ organizational capacity to absorb large loans. His estimate of roughly ten billion gold marks for German consolidation loans over the following few years is an experienced judgment rather than a demonstrated law; reparations enter primarily as a problem of market capacity.
The conceptual centre is the transition from British money-market leadership to American securities-market leadership. Britain attracted funds through bills and commercial finance; America draws them through securities and speculation. Inflation, technological innovation, and exceptional capital gains have encouraged investment in shares despite low current yields. The difference between these yields and those on fixed-interest securities measures the optimism embedded in anticipated growth—and the danger if expectations fail.
Speculation nevertheless has a productive institutional function. Investors willing to capitalize future expansion supply favoured enterprises with unusually cheap funds for experimentation and growth. Somary associates this process with a redistribution of wealth between generations as well as countries: older rentiers lose ground while younger investors, workers, and peasants enter speculative markets. International investment thus cannot be understood simply as American lending to Europe.
Capital controls, he argues, cannot reliably suppress these movements and may provoke flight when announced. His comparison with the Russian state sharpens the argument: even access to foreign borrowing would not reproduce the favourable financing available to promising capitalist enterprises. Speculative valuation finances future industry in a way that ordinary borrowing at rates reflecting average creditworthiness does not. Somary accordingly advocates studying leading shares and their yield differential against fixed-interest investments.
The conclusion qualifies the recovery thesis through the insecurity of foreign property. Formal legal protection may lack effective enforcement, while nationalist resistance encourages enterprises to seek sufficient scale to enlist diplomatic support and to concentrate production at home. When civil remedies fail, creditor claims risk becoming occasions for political coercion.
Capital thus moves unevenly toward secure, profitable, expanding economies, reinforcing existing advantages while bypassing less protected destinations. Somary connects speculative valuation and industrial dynamism with international power: financial recovery can coexist with growing inequalities and conflicts between creditors and debtors.
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