The archive.

When property owners face distress, how can an inquiry establish whether taxation is to blame? In these interventions at the building-tax reform hearing of 7 December 1903, published in 1904, Richard Reisch tests testimony about Olmütz against competing explanations: corrected rental declarations, provincial and municipal levies, mortgage borrowing, and the peculiar conditions of forced sales. Speaking as a government official, he accepts the reality of local hardship while disputing its attribution to the state building tax. His questions expose consequential differences between a tax’s formal payer and its eventual bearer, and between a foreclosure price and a property’s value. This brief hearing document offers a concrete encounter with fiscal reasoning under challenge, including Reisch’s pointed objection that gradual tax cuts need not deliver the promised relief to tenants.

If a reduction in the house-rent tax raises property values, what happens when the state taxes that gain? In two brief interventions at the building-tax reform hearing of 8 December 1903, Richard Reisch presses an expert on this fiscal tension. He asks whether the capitalized value of the tax saving could provide the basis for taxing the resulting appreciation—and whether claiming the whole gain for public purposes would effectively redeem the tax being reduced. His contribution is a pointed request for clarification, not a settled policy proposal. The exchange draws a precise distinction between general property appreciation and gains generated by tax relief, showing why the source of an increase in value matters to the design of a tax.

Who gains when a tax on rental income is reduced: tenants, building owners, or sellers of land? In these interventions at the building-tax reform inquiry of 9 December 1903, Richard Reisch tests expert predictions against one another rather than presenting a reform programme of his own. His sharpest objection concerns construction: if tax relief is absorbed into higher land prices, why should purchasers have much incentive left to build? Questioning Professor Schwarz about rapidly expanding Mährisch-Ostrau, he also asks whether declining profitability reflects higher property valuations rather than lower income. This brief hearing document offers a concrete encounter with the difficulty of promising cheaper housing, rising asset values, and replacement tax revenue from the same measure.

Reisch trains his 1912 offprint on a narrow but consequential dispute: whether the Austrian state, now a vast industrial entrepreneur through its railways, mines, post, and monopolies, may keep accounts no private firm would tolerate. The quarrel between cameralistic and commercial bookkeeping, he argues, is not one of formal preference but of economic adequacy — cameralistics merely compares budget estimate to outturn and calls any overshoot a success, while commercial accounting measures whether wealth has been preserved or consumed. Fixing on the state railways' refusal to depreciate rolling stock, he shows how omitted depreciation manufactures fictional surpluses, inflates the buyout burden at nationalization, and lets the state consume its own capital unawares. His remedy: genuine asset accounting and enterprise balance sheets, with parliamentary budget rights left intact.

Die Insuffizienz des Vermögens gibt gewiß nicht das Recht, auf eine Verrechnung des Vermögens überhaupt zu verzichten!

English translation: “The insufficiency of assets certainly does not confer the right to dispense with the accounting of assets altogether!”

As the Habsburg monarchy dissolved into rival successor states, the new German-Austria faced a fiscal wreckage that Reisch likens to an earthquake-damaged building whose foundations — state credit and currency — must still bear the load. Financial policy, he insists, reaches far beyond the levying of taxes: honoring the war-loan Lombard promises would have calmed the panic, whereas the bank's passive resistance turned consolidated war debt back into dangerous floating note debt. He attacks the exaggerated fiscalism and 'tax-security psychosis' of the hour — the twelve percent default interest, the controls on correspondence and postal transfers — while conceding that some devaluation is unavoidable and that a fair one-time capital levy should wait until borders and currency are settled. His remedy is conservative surgery, not amputation.

Finanzpolitik darf sich keineswegs in Steuerpolitik erschöpfen.

English translation: “Financial policy must by no means exhaust itself in tax policy.”

Printing notes can fund an appropriation, but can it supply the resources to build a power station? In this 1922 article urging subscriptions to the new Austrian Nationalbank, Richard Reisch makes that distinction central to monetary reconstruction. Drawing on his experience as finance secretary, he connects banking safeguards to the choices of savers who, fearing depreciation, move wealth into foreign currencies, property, or valuables rather than domestic production. His case for ending state dependence on the printing press rests on international financing as well as fiscal restraint. Yet monetary discipline does not, for him, mean restoring the crown’s former value: stable calculation matters more than unlimited appreciation. The article brings a practical tension into focus—confidence must enable reconstruction, but institutions must earn it through their conduct.

Political defeat need not settle the question of public merit. In this 1923 obituary, Richard Reisch defends Ernst Plener’s pursuit of national accommodation and constitutional government while locating his more durable achievements in currency and tax reform. Reisch writes not only as an admirer but as a former young finance-ministry official who witnessed the painstaking deliberations behind personal-tax legislation. His recollections give concrete substance to the tribute: revenue needs, provincial interests, and parliamentary demands had to be negotiated, not simply resolved by technical expertise. Read as a sympathetic assessment rather than a neutral biography, the obituary shows how Reisch measured a statesman’s achievement—and why he contrasted the patient legislative work of the 1890s with the haste of his own time.

How could Austria’s central bank expand the note circulation while claiming to have ended inflation? In this 1923 article recording a lecture, Richard Reisch, the bank’s president and a former finance minister, defends the distinction between money issued to cover government deficits and money backed by liquid foreign-exchange reserves. His explanation connects the mechanics of currency defence to difficult choices: stabilizing the crown rather than restoring its prewar value, protecting reserves rather than forcing appreciation, and restricting credit despite businesses’ urgent needs. Readers encounter a policymaker explaining both his institution’s powers and their limits. For Reisch, monetary stability could restore conditions for economic calculation, but no issue of banknotes could replace the productive capital lost through war and inflation.

Would a stronger krone repair Austria’s monetary losses—or unsettle its newly achieved stability? In this 1924 rejoinder to Dr. Spitzmüller, Austrian National Bank president Richard Reisch defends the established dollar exchange rate against demands for appreciation. He argues that rising note circulation need not mean excessive money creation: it may instead reflect recovering demand for currency. His defence of gold-based stability also rests on concrete commitments—foreign-exchange reserves, shareholder subscriptions and loans whose value a new parity would alter. The article exposes a tension within his position: an external monetary rule should restrain discretion, yet Austria’s particular parity emerged from emergency administrative decisions. Readers can examine how a central banker turns the costs and obligations of reconstruction into an argument against reopening the settlement.

Would raising the krone’s value repair the damage of inflation—or impose another round of losses? In these 1924 discussion remarks, Austrian National Bank president Richard Reisch answers Spitzmüller’s proposal for appreciation from the standpoint of an institution charged with sustaining monetary stability. He distinguishes reversible note issues backed by liquid foreign exchange from inflationary finance, then follows the consequences of a stronger krone through export receipts, wages, taxes, and the bank’s own reserves. His central objection is concrete: changing money’s value cannot replace resources already consumed, while uneven adjustments redistribute burdens among contracting parties. The article shows why a central banker could regard reserve accumulation and exchange controls not as obstacles to recovery, but as safeguards against renewed disruption.

When does rescuing a failing bank serve the public rather than its owners? In this 1925 article, based on a Budapest lecture, Richard Reisch answers as president of the Austrian National Bank: the privilege of issuing money entails responsibilities beyond shareholder returns, but rescue must never endanger the currency. His defence of Austrian bank and stock-exchange interventions brings that tension into focus. Their immediate objectives were not ultimately achieved, yet he argues that they limited damage elsewhere—an outcome whose value cannot be measured against an observable alternative. Readers encounter a central banker explaining why even a culpably managed institution may warrant support, while insisting that finite reserves and sound monetary backing set limits to intervention.

Double-entry accounting, in the form Pacioli gave it, is for Reisch the enduring foundation of the discipline, even as the surrounding literature otherwise mirrors the broader course of economic development. He contrasts an older writing that explained bookkeeping to jurists and adapted it to new legal forms — joint-stock companies, cooperatives, limited-liability firms — with a newer one bent on modernization through machines, faster reporting, business administration, statistics, and operational control. This brief foreword praises the volume it introduces for surveying such proposed reforms systematically, while cautioning that only the passage of time will separate what proves lasting and useful from the pseudo-reforms of the moment.

So verbindet sich die Buchhaltung mit der Statistik und dient womöglich als Konjunkturenbarometer im kleinen, aus dessen Angaben dann die Konjunkturforschungsinstitute ihre großen Wetterberichte zusammenstellen können.

English translation: “Thus bookkeeping combines with statistics and possibly serves as a business-cycle barometer in miniature, from whose data the business-cycle research institutes can then compile their great weather reports.”