Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Elemér Hantos, Die Zukunft des Geldes (1921)

Schwiedland’s review examines Hantos’s account of postwar monetary reconstruction, moving from the altered economic function of money through proposed financial remedies to the prospects for restoring gold-based currency systems. Its opening correction identifies the book’s governing concern:

Der Titel der Schrift würde richtiger lauten: „Die Währung der Zukunft“.

English translation: The title of the work would more correctly read: "Die Währung der Zukunft" (The Currency of the Future).

The distinction directs attention from money in general to the institutional and economic conditions of currency stability. As Schwiedland reports Hantos’s argument, the former correspondence between monetary circulation and commodity turnover has broken down. With money tokens vastly exceeding available goods, money has become a credit instrument—a claim on future production whose value depends on economic reconstruction. Financial policy consequently cannot be separated from the social question: rebuilding productive capacity requires it to serve social policy.

The review outlines three proposed measures: a compulsory loan to stabilize the currency before assessing a levy on wealth denominated in fluctuating monetary units; restoration of bank-based backing; and, finally, devaluation. Budgetary economy remains the overriding fiscal principle. Hantos also makes reconstruction conditional on revising the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, and Trianon. Territorial fragmentation, open borders, and excessive debt burdens make the defeated states’ monetary difficulties an international political problem.

Schwiedland then follows the distinction between money’s internal purchasing power and its external exchange value. Domestic depreciation had been more conspicuous during the war; exchange-rate deterioration now predominates. The explanation combines monetary expansion and slower circulation with psychological influences and constraints on production, including labour shortages, transport obstacles, and rising costs. This diagnosis limits what monetary contraction alone can achieve:

Diese Disparität kann nur durch allmähliche Steigerung der Produktion verringert werden.

English translation: This disparity can be diminished only by a gradual increase of production.

The passage makes production central to stabilization. Even reducing the monetary supply to its former level would leave it disproportionate to the goods reaching the market. Currency reform must therefore accompany recovery in the real economy rather than substitute for it.

The review’s longest section concerns whether Central European states can return to prewar gold orthodoxy. After noting Hantos’s engagement with the Brussels Financial Conference and several monetary theorists, Schwiedland presents his expectation that European reconstruction will retain a connection to gold:

Die Wiederherstellung der Währungssysteme der europäischen Staaten wird keine Abkehr vom Golde bringen.

English translation: The restoration of the currency systems of the European states will bring no turning away from gold.

This is nevertheless a conditional and staged return. A renewed gold standard would require the major states to support gold’s value as buyers and sellers; meanwhile, statutory gold prices should rise to two or three times their prewar level. Defeated and economically weak new states would initially use Goldkernwährung or Golddevisenwährung. International credit is indispensable, both to reconstruct fragmented Central Europe and to prevent its currency distress from endangering other economies. Hantos expects uncovered banknotes and state notes to persist, while foreign-currency loans permit external debts to be paid through credit. Inflation should be reduced gradually, with a stable relationship between goods, wages, and monetary value as the practical objective.

Schwiedland’s explicit disagreement comes at the close:

Verf. rechnet eigentümlicherweise die Goldkern- bzw. die Golddevisenwährung zu den Gold-, nicht zu den Papierwährungen, wohin sie m. E. (vgl. meine kleine Schrift „Geld und Währung“, Wien 1921) gehören.

English translation: The author, curiously enough, reckons the gold-bullion and the gold-exchange standard among the gold currencies and not among the paper currencies, to which in my opinion (cf. my short work "Geld und Währung", Vienna 1921) they belong.

This taxonomic objection distinguishes the reviewer’s own position from the argument he has largely been reporting. For Schwiedland, the proposed intermediate arrangements belong among paper currencies despite their gold connection. The review thus captures both a reconstruction programme linking monetary stability to production, social policy, and international credit, and a conceptual dispute over what should count as a gold currency under postwar conditions.