Fritz Machlup · 1929
Machlup’s short book review evaluates Kuczynski’s documentation of German foreign borrowing as an indispensable basis for economic controversy. He first situates the German edition within research on international economic reconstruction: it extends the earlier American Loans to Germany by including all creditor countries and loans granted in 1927. Its importance lies in establishing the scale and character of indebtedness before debating its consequences.
Man mochte für oder gegen das Schuldenmachen im Auslande sein, die notwendige sachliche Basis des Meinungsstreites war zunächst die Frage nach Quantität und Qualität dieser Schulden.
English translation: One might be for or against contracting debts abroad; the necessary factual basis of the dispute of opinions was in the first place the question as to the quantity and quality of these debts.
This distinction between factual knowledge and policy judgment organizes Machlup’s praise. He values Kuczynski’s compilation as a complete, orderly grouping of disputed facts, while explicitly distancing it from the productions of the “empirisch-realistischen Richtung der Nationalökonomie.” The conceptual move is to defend systematic empirical work without endorsing that school’s approach: evidence gives controversy a foundation but does not itself settle whether foreign borrowing is desirable.
Die Ergebnisse seiner Arbeit gaben der lärmenden Diskussion über die Frage der deutschen Anleihen im Ausland erst den richtigen Halt.
English translation: The results of his work were the first to give the clamorous discussion of the question of German loans abroad its proper footing.
Machlup then follows the book’s two-part structure. The first part records loan volumes and their distribution among creditor countries and types of borrowers. His observation that public bodies account for a substantial share introduces a note of unease into an otherwise strongly favorable assessment. The second part examines loan conditions; Machlup reports Kuczynski’s conclusion that German borrowers obtained costly credit.
Es hätten sich wahrscheinlich günstigere Bedingungen erzielen lassen, wenn die Frage der Kreditaufnahme nicht durch die verschiedenen Eingriffe und Extempores der deutschen offiziellen Stellen kompliziert worden wäre.
English translation: More favourable terms could probably have been obtained had the question of raising credit not been complicated by the various interventions and improvisations of the German official agencies.
The closing counterfactual connects borrowing costs to official intervention, while retaining the qualification “wahrscheinlich.” The review thus moves from the need for reliable debt statistics to concern about public-sector borrowing and the effects of administrative interference. Its central claim remains methodological and practical: informed argument about international capital movements requires precise knowledge of the obligations incurred.
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