The archive.

A currency may buy goods without giving its holder freedom to choose what to buy. This distinction anchors Richard Kerschagl’s 1955 article on convertibility and economic organization. Ration cards provide his concrete test: when purchasing requires a personal entitlement as well as money, equal nominal incomes no longer confer equal command over goods. Kerschagl argues that monetary rules cannot function independently of the institutions governing production, credit, and trade. Yet his criticism of intervention does not become a blanket rejection of transitional arrangements: multilateral clearing, including the European Payments Union, can help advance convertibility. The article offers a way to distinguish restrictions that diminish money’s general usefulness from arrangements that may widen it, making convertibility a question of economic freedom and institutional compatibility rather than exchange technique alone.

Does a growing literature on business cycles necessarily mean better understanding? In this brief 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl defends the nearly unchanged republication of Arthur Spiethoff’s early-1920s study while acknowledging its distance from contemporary model-based economics. His pointed judgment is that subsequent research, for all its volume, has added comparatively little to Spiethoff’s treatment of the central problems. Yet his defence is not simply retrospective: he singles out the statistical tables as evidence of what historical inquiry can contribute to economic theory. The review offers a compact statement of Kerschagl’s standards for intellectual progress—analytical reach and useful evidence rather than novelty or quantity.

Can economic planning preserve the market mechanism, and can unions of sovereign states reconcile welfare with defence? These are the possibilities Richard Kerschagl finds worth examining in his brief 1956 review of Meade’s Probleme nationaler und internationaler Wirtschaftsordnung. His interest is qualified by a sharp suspicion: what Meade calls liberal-socialist thinking, Kerschagl argues, begins with liberal theory but ends in socialist practice. Yet this objection does not prevent him from valuing the discussion of economic union or welcoming the German translation. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who tests Meade’s proposals both against their political implications and against continental scholarship he believes Meade has neglected.

An additional billion schillings may create employment—but where does the billion come from? In this short 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl welcomes Josef Steindl’s empirical study, published by the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, while drawing a firm boundary around its conclusions. Estimates of employment gains, he argues, cannot settle the question of inflation without distinguishing money creation, credit finance and investment backed by real capital. His warning about financing hydropower through banknote issuance gives the objection a concrete edge. The review offers a compact encounter between appreciation of statistical modelling and suspicion of Keynesian assumptions: Kerschagl accepts the study’s findings as valuable, but disputes their sufficiency as an economic assessment.

Industrialization may foster economic self-sufficiency, yet surplus production can renew the need for international exchange. In this brief review of Sven Helander’s Das Autarkieproblem in der Weltwirtschaft, Richard Kerschagl draws out that tension while questioning a predominantly economic account of it. He values Helander’s extensive evidence on autarkic formations as groundwork for future theoretical models, but sees the prospect of overproduction as a reason to consider slower, better-coordinated development. His sharpest reservation concerns political choice: relations between autarky and the world economy also turn on the alternative of “butter or guns.” The review offers a compact distinction between what an empirical survey can establish and what requires an account of political priorities.

Explaining why business cycles fluctuate is not the same as making their course calculable. Richard Kerschagl’s 1956 review of Walter Adolf Jöhr’s Die Konjunkturschwankungen sharpens this distinction: he welcomes social psychology as a means of understanding irregular economic movements, but argues that it leaves calculation largely general and symbolic. His qualified appreciation also challenges Jöhr’s weighting of monetary factors and asks whether a nearly 700-page synthesis delivers proportionate theoretical gains. This brief review offers a concrete methodological dispute rather than a rejection of psychological explanation: how should economists judge an approach that clarifies the direction of tendencies while weakening their capacity to calculate particular processes?

Platinum’s expanding industrial uses did not necessarily make it a secure store of wealth. In this 1956 survey, Richard Kerschagl examines the tension between growing demand from petroleum refining, chemicals and electrical engineering and the threat of sudden releases from accumulated stocks. His economic perspective separates annual mining output from metal available for sale, and platinum’s specific technical uses from those of increasingly abundant palladium. Concentrated production in Canada and South Africa, uncertain Soviet supplies and divided trading markets complicate any simple equation between scarcity and price. Readers can discover why Kerschagl regarded platinum’s medium-term prospects cautiously favourably while resisting confident short-term forecasts—and how industrial indispensability could coexist with speculative vulnerability.

South Africa mined gold; the United States held it. This contrast anchors Richard Kerschagl’s examination of gold production, reserves, and monetary systems in 1950–1955. He argues that accumulated stocks, international credit, and economic strength mattered far more to monetary power than changes in mining output. His statistical comparisons distinguish newly extracted gold from existing reserves, and reported transfers from evidence of production—a particularly consequential distinction in his assessment of uncertain Soviet figures. Marshall aid and the growth of dollar holdings outside the United States bring the central tension into focus: gold remained a monetary foundation, yet access to that foundation increasingly depended on the American financial centre. The essay offers a concrete account of how gold’s continuing importance could coexist with growing dependence on the dollar.

An exiled Scottish gambler, versed in goldsmith banking and colonial companies, talked Regency France into the first central note-issuing bank the world had seen — and into the speculative ruin of the Compagnie des Indes. Working from rare multilingual sources, Kerschagl reconstructs John Law's life, his Money and Trade Considered, and his land-backed money scheme, whose fatal flaw was the confusion of credit, capital, and money: fiduciary credit may mobilize productive factors but cannot conjure the consumer goods that new purchasing power demands. He catalogs Law's errors against Keynesian parallels, salvages his genuine insights into central banking and legal tender, and traces the wreckage outward to the assignats of the Revolution and the banknote imagery of Goethe's Faust.

"Die Banknote ist nichts anderes als eine Anleihe ohne Zinsen".

English translation: “The banknote is nothing other than an interest-free loan.”

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.

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.