The archive.

A dividend is not the whole of a shareholder’s gain, and a liquidation date does not tell us when losses occurred. These distinctions drive Felix Somary’s 1910 article on measuring the profitability of joint-stock companies. Bringing commercial reasoning to statistical method, he argues that reserves, retained earnings, and the timing of losses must enter calculations that dividend figures alone cannot support. He also separates company profitability from the yield available to someone buying shares at market prices: a high dividend yield may signal a depressed price rather than a flourishing business. The article offers a concrete way to examine how apparently straightforward financial ratios answer different questions—and how poorly chosen accounting categories can distort the record of a business crisis.

A prosperous economy can still lack the cash to withstand a war scare. In this lecture of 5 March 1912, Felix Somary examines how Germany’s industrial expansion and Austrian banks’ growing assets concealed financial vulnerability during the previous summer. His focus is not wealth itself but its availability: German banks financed lasting domestic commitments with short-term foreign funds, while Austrian institutions tied resources up in claims difficult to turn into cash. When foreign creditors declined to renew loans, central reserves bore the strain. Somary’s comparison makes financial preparedness a question of banking practices and fiscal restraint rather than emergency improvisation. It also exposes a tension in wartime finance: gold must meet immediate foreign payments while sustaining the confidence needed to borrow abroad.

Germany’s recurrent money-market strains, Felix Somary argues in this 1912 article, require more than dearer credit: they demand better organization of cash already available. Higher discount rates may punish industries needing working capital rather than those driving a boom, while gold circulating in wages and retail payments cannot simultaneously strengthen Reichsbank reserves. Somary approaches monetary reform through these practical mismatches, connecting bank balances, public treasury operations, and small-denomination notes. Comparisons with England, Austria, and France sharpen his proposals without making foreign institutions ready-made models. The article offers a concrete account of how payment habits and administrative arrangements can create monetary pressure—and why concentrating reserves promises relief while raising its own risks of speculation, dependence, and wartime vulnerability.

A common customs frontier need not imply a common economic state. In this 1915 review of Rudolf Sieghart’s Zolltrennung und Zolleinheit, Felix Somary tests Hungarian demands for tariff separation against the economic conditions that had once justified them. He endorses Sieghart’s historical case against restoring internal barriers, emphasizing Hungarian industry’s development within the union and agriculture’s access to Austrian consumers. His distinctive contribution lies in a question extending beyond that verdict: how much institutional uniformity does customs unity actually require? Common consumption taxes and monopolies coexisted with different direct taxes, railway tariffs, and economic laws—even discriminatory public procurement. This short review distinguishes the case for retaining a customs union from the still-open problem of determining which institutions its members must share.

A bank is not first a lender but an institution whose purpose is to take credit, and from that inversion Somary builds an entire doctrine of banking policy. This revised German edition, expanded from the 1915 original after war and inflation, shifts attention from the asset side of the balance sheet to the liability side, where a bank's size and survival hang on public confidence: banks are servants, not masters, of trust. He rejects theories that make banks autonomous creators of credit and classifies lending by economic liquidity rather than legal form, defining investment credit by whether it exceeds the borrower's liquid assets, at which point it becomes a participation in entrepreneurial risk in the form of credit. Banking crises, he insists, spring less from isolated bad loans than from mismatches among confidence, liquidity, maturity, and institutional form.

Der Industrielle wie der Kaufmann dürfen aus einem Glas trinken, das ihnen nicht gehört; aber es wird ihnen nicht selten gerade in dem Augenblick fortgenommen, in dem sie den stärksten Durst verspüren.

English translation: “The industrialist, like the merchant, may drink from a glass that does not belong to him; but it is not seldom taken from him at the very moment when he feels the strongest thirst.”

Restoring credit in occupied Belgium also meant making German military demands payable. Felix Somary examines this tension from inside the reorganization he helped design: a separate note-issuing department within the Société Générale de Belgique. His 1916 article explains how inaccessible reserves, frozen payments, and proliferating local currencies could paralyse banks whose assets appeared sound. It also defends arrangements that converted requisition claims into spendable francs and financed compulsory contributions through provincial borrowing. Somary’s technical attention to reserve backing and institutional liability sits alongside his justification of occupation policy. Readers can discover how safeguards for noteholders were negotiated against fiscal demands—and how financial reconstruction could serve both everyday exchange and the authority imposing the payments.

With the German Reich facing ruin at the war's end, Somary sets aside whether a capital levy of a fifth or a quarter of national wealth can be justified and asks only how it could actually be carried out. His answer treats emergency taxation as financial engineering: a managed conversion of wealth that avoids forced liquidation, drains inflationary money, and transfers capital to the Reich through verifiable, self-declared valuations. Agricultural land could be taken in kind and resettled on war invalids; a National Ground-Charge Bank would issue Pfandbriefe against priority land charges, a National Securities and Industrial Bank four classes of obligations, and these privately backed instruments, exchanged against war loans, would quietly convert public debt into private claims. He rejects fiscal co-ownership of enterprise, insisting the spheres of state monopoly and private business stay separate lest each corrupt the other.

Soll nicht die Wirtschaft den Staat und der Staat die Wirtschaft korrompieren, so muß das Gebiet des Staatsmonopols und das der Privatunternehmung vorerst getrennt bleiben.

English translation: “If the economy is not to corrupt the state and the state the economy, then the sphere of state monopoly and that of private enterprise must for the time being remain separate.”

When does scholarly caution become a failure of public responsibility? In this first report, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary confronts economists’ delayed opposition to German inflation. His criticism joins a defence of monetary theory to a concrete account of what depreciation concealed: firms could accumulate materials while uncertainty prevented long-term investment. Apparent enrichment, he argues, could coexist with the destruction of productive opportunities. Stabilization, meanwhile, remained vulnerable to reparations arrangements that might undermine central-bank restraint. The report offers a pointed encounter between economic diagnosis and professional obligation: Somary demands further empirical research but refuses to make complete evidence a prerequisite for warning against destructive policy.

Was inflationary finance a necessity of state survival, or a policy whose alternatives went unused? In this brief closing intervention at the 1924 meeting, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary presses the second view. His replies to fellow economists turn disputes over monetary theory into questions of fiscal and central-bank responsibility. He recalls demands for a capital levy during the war and argues that stronger postwar taxation could have displaced reliance on the printing press. His objection to raising the discount rate from 7 to 8 percent—when he suggests perhaps 30 percent was needed—makes the scale of his criticism concrete. The exchange shows precisely where Somary locates avoidable failure, while acknowledging the possible necessity of emergency money creation immediately after the war.

Capital can return after a war without restoring the institutions that once coordinated its movement. In this lecture, delivered in 1928 and published in 1929, Felix Somary approaches that discrepancy as both economist and banker, concerned with decisions that cannot wait for historical hindsight. His distinctive focus is the shift from British commercial finance to American securities speculation: optimistic share valuations can give expanding firms exceptionally cheap capital, even as they expose investors to disappointed expectations. Financial recovery, he argues, also leaves foreign property vulnerable to nationalism and weak legal enforcement. The lecture offers a concrete way to distinguish abundant funds from an effective financial order—and to see how the same investment mechanisms can finance industrial experimentation while widening divisions between secure creditor economies and insecure destinations.

Why would investors accept tiny yields on shares while farmers struggled to borrow even at seven or eight percent? In this closing contribution to a scholarly debate, originally published in 1929, Felix Somary insists that the puzzle concerns the allocation of capital, not simply its scarcity. His example is Sofina, whose high share price dwarfed its dividend; the relevant yield, he reminds an interlocutor, must be calculated against market price rather than nominal value. Alongside his defence of a German debt-consolidation loan, Somary advances a tentative social explanation: income has shifted from older rentiers towards younger speculators. The exchanges expose a precise disagreement over what investors seek from securities—and why settling international debts might not resolve the distortions in long-term lending.

Somary, lecturing at Heidelberg in the war's long aftermath, argues that 1918 recast not merely currencies and trade routes but the very axes of economic politics: state construction, market scale, and world-power position now cut across the old party labels. Liberalism and socialism, once international programs, have both curdled into national interest parties. From this his German survey moves through spaces rather than doctrines, a Britain sunk from ingenious solver to land of unsolved problems, a United States crossing from colonial periphery to world power as the Federal Reserve and New York displace London, a Europe fragmented by tariff walls into a caricature of itself. His boldest proposal is a Franco-German economic union marrying French capital to German labor; his sharpest observation, that the great capitalist organizer and the socialist planner converge in their appetite for monopoly and stabilization.

Das Europa von heute ist eine Karikatur dessen, was es sein sollte.

English translation: “The Europe of today is a caricature of what it ought to be.”