The archive.

Banks can create purchasing power—but can they create the resources that make investment succeed? In this 1928 published lecture, Richard Reisch, president of the Austrian National Bank, examines the gap between a bank’s promise to pay and the goods, savings, and confidence needed to honour it. He acknowledges banks’ capacity to create credit while disputing theories that make it an independent source of wealth. His distinction between temporary bank finance and permanent investment funds becomes especially concrete in securities lending: borrowing to buy more securities can make investments appear securely funded when they still depend on bank credit. The lecture offers a central banker’s account of how financial arrangements can conceal economic limits, and why responsible lending requires attention not just to collateral but to repayment, duration, and borrowers’ conduct.

Could a bank turn reparations disputes from political confrontations into questions of monetary cooperation? In this 1930 article presenting a public lecture, Austrian National Bank president Richard Reisch assesses the newly established Bank for International Settlements with qualified hope. Its promise, he argues, lies less in expansive lending than in sustained consultation among central bankers and new legal protections for internationally held assets. His practical concerns sharpen the institutional question: gold clearing requires security against wartime seizure, while cooperation demands representation for banks expected to entrust their reserves to others. Readers encounter an early assessment of the BIS that links the mechanics of payments to international law—and exposes the tension between expert authority, national sovereignty, and Reisch’s hope of removing reparations from political antagonism.

L. Albert Hahn's Volkswirtschaftliche Theorie des Bankkredits, revised for its third edition, made credit sovereign over money, savings, capital, interest, and the whole business cycle — and it is exactly that supremacy Reisch sets out to dismantle. Admiring Hahn's dialectical gifts but distrusting his taste for paradox, he rejects the metaphor of the money-holder as a national creditor and the fiction of a cashless economy that has never existed. Where Hahn holds that lending itself conjures the deposits banks lend, Reisch answers with clearing, liquidity, collateral, and public trust; drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's roundabout production, he insists that real capital is machines and subsistence goods, not an abstract power to command them. The book, he concludes, is a veiled plea for inflationary credit.

Niemals aber vermag inflatorischer Kredit „Güter aus dem Nichts zu ziehen“.

English translation: “Never, however, is inflationary credit able to "draw goods out of nothing.”

Foreign borrowing can strengthen a central bank’s reserves while making its currency more vulnerable to sudden withdrawals. This paradox anchors Richard Reisch’s 1931 article, publishing a lecture delivered as president of the Austrian National Bank. Defending Austria’s monetary stabilization, Reisch nevertheless argues that discipline cannot mean keeping reserves untouched during a panic or treating every increase in banknotes as inflation. His distinction between money hoarded in fear and money spent on goods gives concrete substance to that position. Readers encounter a central banker weighing domestic credit needs against exchange-rate defence, and explaining why apparently sound reserve figures may conceal dependence on short-term foreign loans. His case for temporary international lending shows how preserving a national currency could require cooperation beyond national borders.

The Great War left Europe's monetary circulation almost wholly in the hands of central banks, which now furnish money rather than merely regulating it — the departure point for Reisch's practical observations, built on Menger, Mises, and Wieser. He reconsiders the banknote itself: once cash payments were suspended, its promise of redemption became a fiction, so the modern Schilling note is better read as a certificate of value whose parity the bank must defend. A discount rate held below the natural rate, he warns, drives production into overlong roundabout processes that end in liquidation and crisis; a wholly cashless economy, against Hahn, remains a fantasy; and the central bank stands as a primus inter pares disciplining the giro-money creation of private banks.

Es ist daher gewiß richtig, wenn die Federal Reserve-Banken die ihnen überreichlich zufließenden Goldmengen in weitem Maße „unausgenützt“ in ihren Kellern einsperren und nicht als Grundlage weiterer Kreditexpansion verwenden.

English translation: “It is therefore certainly correct that the Federal Reserve Banks largely lock away "unused" in their vaults the excessively abundant gold flowing to them, and do not use it as a basis for further credit expansion.”

Can a local currency succeed without vindicating the theory behind it? In this 1933 article, Richard Reisch tests promotional claims for Wörgl’s depreciating municipal money against the financing of its public works. He draws attention to subsidies, recovered tax arrears, and the relending of banknotes held as backing—resources and mechanisms obscured by an emphasis on faster circulation. Yet his criticism does not end in dismissal. Reisch credits Mayor Untergugenberger with mobilizing civic trust and tax compliance, and allows a place for regulated local experiments. The article offers a pointed distinction between monetary innovation and collective cooperation: visible improvements may be real even when their advocates’ explanation remains unproven.

Expanded from two Prague lectures, this 1935 Springer volume confronts a world in which the abandoned gold standard has left currencies isolated and distrusted, with governments reaching for devaluation as a weapon of trade policy. Devaluation, Reisch argues, is merely a valuta dumping that erodes trust and eventually raises the cost of imported inputs and of domestic goods; against it he sets an active policy for 'inländische Auslandwährung,' treating export-earned foreign exchange as a separate mass sold at differentiated rates. He develops Ernst Ružička's plan for a foreign trade bank issuing valuta bonds split into A coupons for vital imports and B coupons for dispensable ones, and offers the scheme as a faster road than devaluation toward a restored gold standard and world monetary peace.

Der Goldstandard war sozusagen die gemeinsame Sprache, das einigende Band im internationalen Handel.

English translation: “The gold standard was, so to speak, the common language, the unifying bond in international trade.”

Before 1914, Reisch observes, payments between nations moved smoothly because trade was freer, exchange rates were stable, and gold served as a common standard; the wreck of that order — through inflation, the abandonment of gold, and what he takes to be erroneous theory — is the disorder this book proposes to cure by stages. He rejects Keynes's money as a mere state-defined unit of account and Hahn's notion of banks conjuring purchasing power from nothing, insisting that credit always rests on real goods or claims. With Ernst Ružička he sketches a subsidiary payment system: neighboring states set up foreign trade banks and reciprocal gold-denominated credit lines, issuing Valutabons whose A coupons cover favored imports and whose B coupons, carrying a customs premium, cover tolerated ones — Leistungskompensation in place of shipping gold.

Die Vermengung der Begriffe Zahlungsmittel und Kreditbefriedigungsmittel erweist sich jedoch als verhängnisvoll: Geld ist wohl Gegenstand der Gewährung von Kredit, Kredit aber ist kein geeignetes Mittel, beliebig viel neues Geld zu schaffen.

English translation: “The conflation of the concepts of means of payment and means of satisfying credit proves to be disastrous: money is indeed an object of the granting of credit, but credit is not a suitable means for creating arbitrary amounts of new money.”