The archive.

Stable money requires coordination—but how much coordination can coexist with economic freedom and central-bank independence? In this 1956 article, Richard Kerschagl rejects both a simple return to gold-standard automaticity and confidence in monetary technique alone. His distinctive emphasis falls on what credit finances, how quickly investment yields output, and whether private saving and capital formation can sustain productive capacity. Interest-rate changes and open-market operations thus appear as instruments whose effectiveness depends on institutions they cannot themselves create. His comparison of Soviet and American arrangements sharpens the tension between controlling purchasing power and preserving freedom in the use of money. Readers can discover why, for Kerschagl, currency stability demands cooperation across economic policy while also requiring protection from government financing needs.

Austria’s 1957 sale of shares in two nationalized banks promised to turn collective wealth into personal property—but how much ownership could it confer without a voice in management? Richard Kerschagl welcomes the experiment as a redistribution of capital rather than a means of raising it, while examining the compromises that preserved state and party control. Small investors could pay in installments and receive a minimum dividend, yet the publicly offered preference shares carried no voting rights. His assessment connects the heavily oversubscribed offering with investors’ desire for security backed by real assets, not simply income. The article makes a concrete distinction between distributing financial claims and fostering a sense of co-ownership: for Kerschagl, even limited participation would have strengthened the scheme’s promise of personal independence.

Can measures designed to protect tenants and farmers undermine the welfare they promise? In this 1958 review of Alfred Amonn’s Wirtschaftspolitik auf Irrwegen, Richard Kerschagl sympathetically examines a market-oriented answer, emphasizing policy disputes relevant to Austria. His treatment of agricultural protection brings the stakes into focus: Amonn’s case for cheaper food and more productive farming entails accepting the closure or absorption of marginal farms. Kerschagl praises the book’s accessible economic reasoning while questioning some of its chosen authorities. The review offers a compact encounter with his evaluative priorities: protection must be judged by its costs to consumers and taxpayers, and individual interventions by their possible cumulative direction—a concern that leads him to endorse Amonn’s warning about collectivism.

Beryllium production expanded even as its price fell: this apparent paradox gives Richard Kerschagl’s 1958 survey its economic focus. A metal valued in aircraft, nuclear technology, and copper alloys was acquiring new sources of supply, notably in India and the Belgian Congo. Yet Kerschagl refuses to equate rising reported tonnage with increased extraction alone: better statistical coverage and improved metal recovery complicate the figures. His account distinguishes geographically dispersed mining from concentrated American and British processing, and connects cheaper supplies with a wider range of economically viable uses. Readers can discover both the changing supply geography of a strategic metal and the care required to interpret production statistics whose units, coverage, and relationship to usable metal vary.

Monetary reform may not deserve first place in European integration, but does that justify postponing it? In this brief 1958 review of Geoffrey Crowther’s Zwei Welten? Oder zwanzig?, Richard Kerschagl welcomes the practical case for abolishing exchange controls in continental Europe and Britain, even while reserving judgement on its theoretical basis. Crowther’s proposal promises limited convertibility rather than an end to the dollar shortage. Kerschagl’s distinctive judgement is that an excessive emphasis on currency reform can still correct its neglect—a compact distinction between endorsing a policy’s priority and recognising the value of pressing it.

What should an account of automation offer beyond technical explanation? In this brief 1958 review, Richard Kerschagl praises the German translation of Georges Hartmann’s book for combining clear concepts with little-known numerical data, reserving particular approval for its treatment of economic and social consequences. His notice offers no examples or detailed critique; its interest lies in the standards of usefulness it articulates and its explicit recognition of French scholarship as a resource for German-speaking readers.

How much can readable monetary journalism achieve when its historical claims do not withstand scholarly scrutiny? In this brief review of Rudolf Mühlfenzl’s Interview mit dem Geld, Richard Kerschagl questions statements about the Lydians and John Law and faults a bibliography restricted to books published in Germany. Yet he distinguishes these weaknesses from the book’s usefulness to lay readers. His qualified endorsement offers a compact example of critical judgement that values accessibility without confusing it with scholarly authority: an entertaining introduction may foster understanding and prompt readers to seek more rigorous work.

Foreign-exchange controls can undermine the balance they are meant to protect: cheap official foreign currency encourages imports while penalizing exporters. In this 1959 article, Richard Kerschagl traces that contradiction through compulsory surrender, rationed allocations, clearing arrangements, and blocked capital transfers. His attention to administrative detail shows how traders adapt to controls through invoice prices and third-country transactions, shifting monetary distortions into trade. Yet his case for realistic exchange rates is not a promise that markets alone will secure stability. Liberalization, he argues, requires credible restraint on inflation and effective coordination of economic policy, with a substantial role for the central bank. The article offers a concrete account of why removing restrictions and establishing durable convertibility are different tasks.

Can Marx remain a valuable critic of industrial society if his economic theory is rejected? In this polemical 1960 article, Richard Kerschagl grants Marx a limited achievement as an economic historian while challenging the explanatory foundations of Capital. His most revealing distinction separates capital’s contribution to production from the capitalist’s entitlement to income: acknowledging the former, he argues, need not justify the latter. From this standpoint, Kerschagl charges Marx with allowing demands about distribution to govern explanations of value and production. Readers encounter a critique informed by marginal-utility reasoning whose insistence on separating scientific explanation from political commitment sits uneasily beside its openly adversarial rhetoric. The article makes that boundary—and the difficulty of maintaining it—the central stake of reassessing Marx.

Cheap housing, guaranteed employment, higher wages: who pays when policy promises to make these benefits affordable? In this 1961 article, Richard Kerschagl compares market and command economies by tracing costs that neither institutional system can abolish. His defence of competitive prices and capital maintenance is qualified by recognition of neglected social needs, concentrated economic power, and the political necessity of employment. He also challenges market advocates who demand protection or subsidies for themselves. The article’s distinctive tension lies between social obligations and his insistence that lasting improvements depend on productive performance. Readers can examine how a benefit received as a worker or tenant may return as a burden on the same person as consumer, taxpayer, or saver—and why economic labels alone cannot settle policy choices.

A low-interest development loan may be expensive; a rigorously supervised one may be impossible to repay. In this 1961 article, Richard Kerschagl compares Eastern and Western financing by looking beyond stated credit terms to equipment prices, commodity deliveries, export markets, and political leverage. He argues that Soviet-bloc credits can conceal costs in tied transactions, while Western lenders too often demand hard-currency repayment without securing borrowers’ opportunities to earn it. His distinctive concern is the connection between financial obligations and actual flows of goods. That perspective also unsettles the equation of development with industrialization: agricultural improvements or transport may serve a country better than prestigious factories. Readers gain concrete criteria for judging aid by its effective costs, local suitability, and repayment prospects rather than its advertised generosity.

For nearly three millennia silver was the money metal of antiquity and the Middle Ages, beside which gold played a modest part; this volume in the series Die metallischen Rohstoffe follows its descent from coinage into the smelter. Kerschagl moves from the chalcophile geology of galena and the Comstock Lode through amalgamation, cupellation, and cyanide leaching to the monetary drama: shifting gold-silver ratios, the Latin Monetary Union's retreat from true bimetallism, and the doomed remonetization schemes of the interwar years. He argues that no one can fix an objective silver price, that most output now comes as a by-product of lead, zinc, and copper mining, and that only twentieth-century industrial demand, not monetary nostalgia, at last stabilized the metal.

Das Silber ist vorläufig in geordnete industrielle Bahnen hinübergelenkt worden und seine monetäre Wiederverwendung weder ein echtes noch auch nur ein sinnvolles Problem mehr.

English translation: “Silver has for the time being been diverted into orderly industrial channels, and its monetary reuse is no longer a genuine or even a meaningful problem.”