Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Richard Kerschagl’s Die Geldprobleme von heute (1922)

Schwiedland’s brief English-language review presents Kerschagl’s pamphlet as an account of inflation, deflation, and national efforts at monetary reconstruction. Its central concern is the connection between unstable currencies and distorted production in postwar Europe:

In Central Europe the progressive inflation has not only disturbed the monetary systems, but has also complicated most severely the problems of production.

The review first explains how currency depreciation can outpace domestic price increases, encouraging exports and fostering production under conditions that eventual stabilisation or deflation will expose as irrational. It then reverses the perspective: countries with stronger currencies face export disadvantages because their costs and prices are comparatively high. Monetary strength therefore offers no simple protection against economic contraction.

So their production is seriously diminishing at a moment when the economic reconstruction of Europe needs the largest possible output of goods.

This tension gives the review its wider significance. Exchange-rate disparities do more than redistribute trading advantages: they obstruct the expansion of output needed for European recovery. Schwiedland moves from these contrasting national predicaments to divergent price trajectories and their relationship to exchange-rate volatility. He also highlights the limits of explaining advanced inflation through note issuance alone:

Inflation in many countries has already proceeded so far, that the movements of the price-level are many times as violent as the quantity of new notes would justify.

The closing assessment identifies Kerschagl’s method as statistical comparison of the principal countries from 1913 to 1920. Schwiedland values the pamphlet for tracing connections among inflation, prices, exchange rates, and production. The review’s compact structure moves from productive distortions to monetary interdependence, ending with an appreciation of the comparative evidence rather than a detailed policy prescription.