Eugen Peter Schwiedland · 1922
Schwiedland’s double book review examines two accounts of wartime and postwar inflation from the standpoint of prevailing monetary theory. Its structure moves from Cannan’s explanation of price movements and gold depreciation to Nicholson’s analysis of domestic social disruption, concluding with remedies that combine productive reform, monetary restraint, and moral resolve.
Cannan führt die Preisbewegung seit 1914 auf die übermäßige Vermehrung der Geldsorten zurück.
English translation: Cannan traces the movement of prices since 1914 back to the excessive increase in the kinds of money.
The review distinguishes legal debt-paying capacity from purchasing power: inconvertible currencies may still discharge obligations while losing value against the gold formerly represented by their denominations. Yet gold itself has also depreciated against goods and services. Wartime gold flows toward neutral countries, Japan, and the United States did not secure prewar quantities of goods; inflation therefore cannot be understood solely as paper money’s divergence from a stable gold benchmark.
Das Sinken der Nachfrage nach Gold hat dieses entwertet.
English translation: The decline in the demand for gold has depreciated it.
Schwiedland’s account connects this monetary depreciation with belligerent states’ purchases at any price and their unproductive consumption of the goods acquired. Continuing note issues diminish purchasing power, prompting further monetary expansion. Foreign holders’ loss of confidence adds another mechanism: when they sell depreciated notes, the released currency affects circulation like an additional issue.
Nicholson supplies the social counterpart to this explanation. Inflation threatens to crush the middle class, while capital-rich groups and wage earners can strengthen their positions through increased incomes. Excessive imports deepen foreign indebtedness; greater domestic production is needed to relieve that burden, but high commodity prices and living costs obstruct recovery. The distinction between money income and real purchasing power becomes especially pointed:
Die Verbilligung der notwendigen Waren würde gleichwohl für den Arbeiter weit wichtiger sein, als eine Erhöhung seines Geldlohnes!
English translation: The cheapening of necessary goods would nevertheless be far more important for the worker than an increase in his money wage!
The concluding programme calls for technical and organizational rationalization, moderation of profit shares, higher interest rates to encourage saving, and expenditure confined to productive purposes. Restoring note convertibility would impose a firm limit on monetary expansion. Schwiedland thus presents stabilization as both an economic and an ethical undertaking:
Alle solche Maßnahmen bedürfen moralischer Stärke; sie ist die Voraussetzung einer Steigerung der gesunkenen Kaufkraft der Geldsorten.
English translation: All such measures require moral strength; it is the precondition of a rise in the fallen purchasing power of the kinds of money.
The review’s significance lies in its compact linkage of monetary quantity, international gold movements, real purchasing power, and class relations. Its closing appeal to moral strength makes explicit the discipline that the proposed recovery requires, while the discussion of middle-class erosion and resistance to note contraction shows why stabilization is socially fraught.
This work was divided into 3 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 3 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian