The archive.

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.

Starting economic analysis with individual wants does not, for Friedrich von Wieser, entail unrestricted economic freedom. In this dictionary article, he presents the Austrian School’s shared foundation in marginal utility while identifying disagreements among Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and himself. The revealing tension lies between subjective need and market valuation: monetary offers register purchasing power as well as the urgency of wants. Wieser therefore assigns public provision a different standard from market exchange and argues for progressive taxation. His account lets readers see how a common theory of value could support divergent explanations of interest and different judgements about economic policy. It is both an exposition of Austrian economics and a participant’s effort to define its scope without suppressing its internal differences.

Austria's monetary history from 1892 to 1924 becomes, in this English-language report, a case study in how stability depends on more than a loan. Schumpeter traces the late-Habsburg gold-exchange crown, its destruction by wartime finance through discounted treasury bills and bank advances, the monetary dismemberment that followed imperial collapse, and the 1922 Geneva protocols that brought League of Nations control. The achievement, he insists, was not restoring the old crown but stabilizing at the fallen parity, 14,400 paper crowns to one gold crown, once note issue for the treasury had stopped and an independent National Bank could defend the exchange. His verdict stays guarded: inflation had wrecked saving, imports outran exports, and Vienna's financial role remained uncertain. A gold-exchange standard holds only when fiscal discipline, banking, and productive recovery sustain the promise.

The program of reconstruction was essentially a program of economic liberalism.

A privately owned central bank might reassure foreign creditors without managing money any better than a public institution. This distinction anchors Alfred Amonn’s critique of Czechoslovakia’s proposed bank of issue. He judges institutional reform by what it actually provides: reserves, control over note circulation, and a usable monetary yardstick. Diverting capital-levy receipts to government debt repayment, he argues, would weaken the new bank’s starting position. His defence of a larger monetary unit introduces a subtler tension: redenomination cannot itself change purchasing power, yet it can make losses in real income visible. Rent controls and senior civil-service salaries show how misleading nominal figures can obstruct adjustment. The article offers a concrete encounter with monetary reform as both financial engineering and a problem of public perception.

Higher farm prices can enrich agricultural producers while leaving the economy poorer. In this 1925 discussion article, Alfred Amonn challenges E. Laur’s inference from agricultural prosperity to national gain by asking what increased domestic production displaces. Labour and capital drawn into farming might otherwise produce industrial goods capable of purchasing more food through international exchange; farmers’ increased purchasing power must also be weighed against consumers’ losses. Amonn’s distinctive insistence is that physical output, sectoral income, and national income require separate judgements. His qualified allowance for temporary protection makes this more than a categorical argument against intervention. The article offers a concrete way to test claims of national benefit: compare alternative uses of resources rather than treating one sector’s gains as gains for everyone.

Can a theory of individual satisfaction explain prices, incomes, and the organization of a social economy? In this two-part critical article, Alfred Amonn tests Friedrich von Wieser’s answer against distinctions that economic abstraction can obscure: between subjective valuation and monetary calculation, individual purposes and relations among persons, explanation and ethical judgment. His objection is concrete: equal prices do not imply equal satisfactions, and accounting in money does not establish that utilities can be added together. Reviewing Wieser’s second edition, Amonn combines appreciation of its sociological insight with scrutiny of explanations that presuppose the prices they seek to derive. The article offers a sustained encounter with the limits of utility-based explanation—and with the question of what disappears when a society is modelled as a single economic subject.

A theory of prices can be logically consistent yet fail to explain why people earn different incomes. In this rejoinder to Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Amonn withdraws several earlier objections to the reconstructed objective theory of value, then tests the assumptions that remain. Equally capable producers may accept lower earnings to avoid danger or disagreeable work; equal working conditions do not identify a uniquely “normal” worker. These concrete difficulties sharpen Amonn’s distinction between deductive coherence and empirical explanation. His defence of subjective valuation is equally precise: judgments shaped by social circumstances are still judgments made by individuals. The reader encounters an argument for retaining valuing subjects in price theory without treating them as socially isolated—or endorsing marginal utility theory wholesale.

Stabilizing the franc, in Oskar Morgenstern’s 1926 review of George Peel’s The Financial Crisis of France, requires more than a monetary remedy: it demands repair of the fiscal machinery behind the currency. Morgenstern praises Peel’s account of fragmented budgets, outdated taxation, and debt-financed warfare, while questioning the reliability of international comparisons of wealth, income, and tax burdens. His review is especially revealing where endorsement gives way to independent judgement: on the limits of inflation as debt relief, the tension between French objections to international transfers and demands for German reparations, and the merits of a return to gold. Readers can discover how a favorable review becomes a precise argument about the fiscal conditions of monetary stability—and the evidence used to assess them.

A monetary doctrine can guide policy effectively while leaving its causal explanation incomplete. That tension shapes Hayek’s review of the German translation of Gustav Cassel’s Das Geldwesen nach 1914. He praises Cassel’s practical guidance but challenges the direct link drawn between the quantity of money and the general price level: monetary effects, Hayek insists, unfold through successive changes in individual prices. His objection exposes a further assumption—treating price stability as the normal condition can make every departure appear monetary in origin. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s scrutiny of policy remedies: even a credit restriction capable of preventing depreciation and crises must be judged against its possible cost to economic development.

A stable price index need not mean that money has ceased to disturb economic life. This distinction drives Hayek’s 1926 combined review of monetary studies by J. R. Bellerby and G. M. Verrijn Stuart. He challenges Bellerby for assuming that price-level stabilization supplies the proper policy goal, while crediting Verrijn Stuart with attempting to justify that connection—and finding his proof wanting. Hayek’s criticism is discriminating: he values Bellerby’s practical comparisons and Verrijn Stuart’s account of interest and monetary value without accepting their central premise. The review offers a compact encounter with a precise monetary problem: what must be demonstrated before an average of changing prices can serve as evidence that money is leaving price and income formation undisturbed?

What makes a short account of a complex banking system useful? In this brief 1926 review, Oskar Morgenstern commends T. E. Gregory’s forty-page study for combining compression with a clear grasp of what distinguishes American banking from European practice. His selection of examples—branch banking, Federal Reserve discount policy and open market operations, and the connection between deflation and agricultural crisis—shows what he considers essential to that orientation. The review offers a compact statement of Morgenstern’s standards for economic exposition: comparative knowledge, sharply drawn distinctions, and citations that allow readers to pursue questions independently.

How can the value of a single productive good be extracted from a utility that several goods together bring about? This is the imputation problem—Zurechnung, a term Wieser had borrowed from law—and Hayek treats it in 1926 not as a footnote to marginal utility but as the decisive next step in grounding distribution on subjective value. He surveys the Austrian solutions of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser, sets marginal productivity in its place as a supplement rather than an independent answer, and exposes a circularity at the heart of the received theory: product values are derived from factor values through cost, yet factor values are supposedly read off product values. His restatement recasts the whole question as one of allocating given quantities of productive goods among competing lines of production according to the scales of needs—soluble only for the entire economic system at once.

Wieser betrachtet den Wert als die Rechenform des Nutzens.

English translation: “Wieser regards value as the computational form of utility.”