The archive.

By 1923 the German banking world was consumed, as Hahn puts it, from morning to night with a single anxiety, the preservation of its capital substance, yet the third edition of Adolf Weber's textbook still fought the prewar battle against the great credit banks. Reviewing it, Hahn dismantles three inherited doctrines: Weber's moralized contrast between English deposit banks and German speculation banks, his loose account of liquidity, and his theory of credit and capital. Genuine risk, he insists, sits with merchants and manufacturers, not with bankers. Liquidity, in a clearing economy, means access to central-bank money rather than idle cash. And the only thing that matters about any credit is whether it enlarges the purchasing power already circulating. Inflation, on this reading, came from state finance, not from weak reserves.

Das Kontokorrentgeschäft aber ist zweifellos das unspekulativste Geschäft, das überhaupt möglich ist, denn seine Gewinnchancen sind in den bedungenen Zinsen und Provisionen von vornherein festgelegt.

English translation: “The current-account business, however, is undoubtedly the least speculative business that is possible at all, for its profit prospects are fixed in advance by the stipulated interest and commissions.”

A ceiling on foreign borrowing means little, L. Albert Hahn argues, without asking where the borrowed money goes. In this brief conference contribution, published in 1929, he challenges Somary’s proposed ten-billion limit on debt-consolidation loans while distinguishing their marketability from Germany’s capacity to pay reparations. His decisive contrast is concrete: proceeds spent on production or consumption place new demands on capital markets; proceeds used to repay existing debts return funds to investors. This perspective leads him to consider exchanging new securities for outstanding American debt rather than seeking fresh subscriptions. The contribution offers a compact way to think beyond headline borrowing totals: a large securities issue need not represent an equally large new demand for capital.

Explaining a credit-driven boom is not the same as endorsing it. In this brief conference intervention, published in 1929, Frankfurt bank director L. Albert Hahn defends monetary business-cycle theory while affirming his opposition to credit-fuelled expansion. Drawing on banking practice, especially in London, he challenges the notion that monetary explanations are merely theorists’ inventions. He also asks what a theory of the cycle should explain: every disturbance caused by war, commodity markets or accident, or a more specific recurring pattern? His focus on prewar cycles accompanied by rising prices exposes how selecting the phenomena can shape the explanation. The contribution offers a compact encounter with a banker separating policy judgement from economic analysis—and defending monetary theory without claiming to settle causal priority.

How much deflation would Germany need to turn reparations payments into goods sold abroad? In this brief conference contribution, Albert Hahn argues that the decisive disagreement concerns the scale of adjustment, not simply rival economic theories. He separates the sacrifice involved in raising reparations domestically from the additional costs of transferring their equivalent abroad: a fall in living standards does not, by itself, establish a transfer obstacle. Yet theory cannot tell him how far German exporters must cut prices to overcome foreign resistance to their goods. His cautious confidence rests instead on observed trade flexibility. The contribution offers a compact encounter with an economist who insists on conceptual distinctions while acknowledging the practical uncertainties that limit prediction.

A stable currency can coexist with a devastating economic contraction: this distinction drives L. Albert Hahn’s 1929 conference contribution on reparations transfers. Hahn shifts attention from whether Germany can ultimately generate the necessary foreign exchange to the dangerous interval before production and trade adjust. Foreign borrowing, he argues, can bridge that interval without cancelling the incentives for adjustment; blocking it would force sharper reductions in prices and wages, placing an additional burden on workers. His defence of transfer’s monetary feasibility is therefore no claim that reparations are painless. The contribution offers a precise way to separate exchange-rate stability from economic tolerability—and explains why, for Hahn, provoking a crisis by obstructing foreign loans would not prove that reparations were impossible.

Foreign loans helped Germany transfer reparations abroad—but did that prove transfers were impossible without them? In this conference contribution, L. Albert Hahn challenges that inference by showing how reparations payments can themselves attract foreign credit. Rising exchange rates and tightening domestic money make foreign borrowing more attractive, cushioning deflation while postponing adjustment in production and trade. His monetary perspective exposes a tension between keeping external payments flowing and protecting the domestic economy from disruption. The sharpest consequence concerns transfer protection: a clause safeguarding the currency need not safeguard against economic crisis. Readers can discover why the success of a payment mechanism, in Hahn’s account, offers no simple measure of its domestic cost.

Rein wörtlich genommen garantiert die Transferschutzklausel nur Währungsschutz und nicht Krisenschutz.

English translation: “Taken strictly literally, the transfer-protection clause guarantees only currency protection, not protection against crises.”