The archive.

Cashless payment is far older than the banknote: Roman argentarii kept transfer accounts, and Greek Egypt ran giro offices and even a grain giro linking natural, money and credit economies. Commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Wiener Giro- und Cassen-Verein, this historical study traces book-money from antiquity through the medieval exchange fairs of Lyon and Besançon, the Hamburg Girobank and its Mark Banco, English goldsmith notes, the London Clearing House, and Austria-Hungary's own Saldierungsverein. Kerschagl argues throughout that clearing lets an economy function on the smallest possible stock of cash, and closes by criticising Austria's postwar fiscal measures—the Bankenumsatzsteuer among them—for favouring cash over the book transfer just when a credit economy most needed the opposite encouragement.

Von welcher Bedeutung das Clearing für die Geldschöpfung und die Möglichkeit der Erhaltung einer möglichst geringen Geldmenge ist, zeigen am besten wohl die Umsätze des Clearinghouse, die im Jahre 1920 in London allein mehr als 32 Milliarden Pfund betrugen.

English translation: “How significant clearing is for the creation of money and for the possibility of maintaining as small a money supply as possible is perhaps best shown by the turnover of the Clearing House, which in 1920 amounted to more than 32 billion pounds in London alone.”

Confidence, not accounting, is the true stake of Austria's 1922 fiscal crisis - a credible currency and a state able to impose sacrifice rather than merely distribute losses. Schumpeter credits two successes: the crown pulled back from collapse in everyday exchange, and Social Democratic pressure winning the index law, housing controls, and relief from income tax. Yet the original deflationary program - a new note bank, cost-covering state prices, indirect taxes, and an internal loan on compulsory security - has been perverted by compromise, its saving measures abandoned and its mortgage device turned into an assault on mobile capital. A forced loan strictly enforced would break firms and employment; financed by state advances, it would reproduce inflation. Vienna can stay a financial center only if owners trust property will not be trapped by emergency improvisation, yet bourgeois parties meet pressure with indignation instead of leadership.

Das könnten wir nun doch endlich einmal gelernt haben, daß das mobile Kapital herangelockt werden muß und daß es niemals herangezwungen werden kann.

English translation: “Surely we could by now finally have learned that mobile capital must be attracted and that it can never be coerced.”

Not the sheer surfeit of money, but the unequal income shifts it sets loose, does the deepest damage in an inflation—so runs the argument of this diagnosis of the postwar currency crisis. Kerschagl frames three problems: the changing value of money, the expansion and contraction of the money economy, and the practical resistance to inflation. He separates a currency's internal value, its domestic purchasing power, from its external value in exchange rates, tracing depreciation to state debt monetised into banknotes, collapsing confidence and a panic hunger for goods. Rašín's note-stamping, a wealth levy and staged devaluation are weighed as techniques; England's deflation attempts of 1919 to 1921 are followed in statistical detail; and the Brussels Financial Conference under Cassel supplies the closing counsel that production and thrift, not technical measures, cure a currency.

Nur die Kuh, welche wirklich Milch hat, kann welche geben.

English translation: “Only the cow that actually has milk can give any.”

Around the Genoa Conference circulated a tempting proposal: a cartel of European note-issuing banks that would discipline currencies into stability. Schumpeter treats it as premature rather than impossible. Monetary disorder, he argues, is no autonomous defect curable by a banking formula; it is the outward sign of war, imperial breakup, reparations, and state finance by the printing press. A cartel would force the strongest states to underwrite the weakest - politically implausible, economically asymmetric. Austria is his test case: entering such a system would halt the note press overnight and impose austerity exceeding the country's political and moral resources. Against uniform continental recipes he sets a monetary pluralism, contrasting Germany's reparations bind, France's defense of the franc, and Austria's fragility. Monetary reconstruction, the essay concludes, must follow real reconstruction, not precede it.

Während also bei uns, sowohl nach unserer besonderen ökonomischen Lage als auch nach der Natur des Österreichers, besondere Vorsicht und Schonung notwendig ist, empfiehlt sich anderswo vielleicht eine ganz andere Politik.

English translation: “While among us, in view both of our particular economic situation and of the nature of the Austrian, special caution and forbearance are necessary, quite a different policy may perhaps be advisable elsewhere.”

What connects competing economic theories beyond their disagreements? In this brief English-language review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents Wolfgang Heller’s book as an attempt to link apparently isolated lines of theoretical inquiry. His clearest example is the shift from older price theory’s emphasis on supply to newer analysis of demand. Rather than judging the rival schools, Schwiedland highlights Heller’s attention to conceptual connections, including those between distribution, costs, and power. Readers find a compact account of Heller’s historical purpose, with a useful distinction: his own theoretical positions are developed in a separate Hungarian treatise, not expounded in this review.

Does money’s development depend chiefly on theories of value or on the institutions that organize payments? In this brief 1922 review of Richard Kerschagl’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland cautiously identifies an institutional thesis: clearing centres and government administration as a centre of payments help shape monetary development. His concise assessment distinguishes Kerschagl’s historical treatment of monetary theory from what remains to be explained—how a medium of exchange becomes legal tender. The review offers a compact glimpse of this shift in explanatory emphasis, while preserving the provisional character of Kerschagl’s account.

A balanced state budget can conceal an economy still out of balance. In this 1922 newspaper article, Emil Lederer tests the fiscal slogans circulating in Germany’s reparations crisis against the ways households, producers and banks actually respond. Taxes passed on through prices may merely turn public borrowing into private debt; reduced consumption may undermine the domestic production needed for recovery. His distinctive concern is the connection between financial adjustment and the survival of productive and social relationships. Rather than promise a painless cure, he argues for sacrifices by owners of tangible assets and cooperation across economically entangled nations. The article offers a compact account of why an apparently sound fiscal measure can defeat its own purpose—and why distributing losses is inseparable from deciding what must be preserved.

A stable currency need not be a stronger currency: this distinction drives Emil Lederer’s 1922 newspaper article on Austria’s krone and its implications for Germany. Foreign loans, he argues, must finance not only current imports but also the sale of banknotes accumulated abroad—a pressure that successful stabilization could itself unleash by ending hopes of speculative gains. The choice of exchange rate is equally consequential. Appreciation could cut exports and force wages down before prices fell, harming workers and producers while benefiting recipients of fixed monetary incomes. Lederer connects these monetary mechanics to Austria’s political conflict and Germany’s public debt, showing why restoring a currency’s former value might obstruct rather than secure economic recovery.

In the Vienna of 1922, ordinary households followed the share listings as a matter of survival, and Moriz Dub set out to explain why. Written as a sequel to his earlier study for the Finanz- und Volkswirtschaftliche Zeitfragen series, this pamphlet insists that the spectacular boom on the Austrian and German exchanges—the Katastrophenhausse—is no prosperity but the market's mirror of currency collapse. Through tables converting Vienna and Berlin quotations into dollar parities, Dub shows that gains reckoned in crowns and marks conceal real impoverishment; investors flee money for Substanzwerte, claims on inventories, land, and machinery. Only monetary stabilization can end the spell, he argues, and its price will be a fall in securities whose rise depended on endless depreciation.

Österreich ist für jenen, der mit fremder Valuta rechnet, das billigste Land Europas, während seine eigenen Bewohner unter unerträglicher Teuerung stöhnen.

English translation: “For anyone reckoning in foreign currency, Austria is the cheapest country in Europe, while its own inhabitants groan under unbearable inflation.”

A remainder in the accounts is not yet an explanation of interest. In this critical article, Franz Xaver Weiss tests Richard Strigl’s claim that capital interest arises from what remains after wages and land rent have been paid. His sharpest objection is that Strigl’s reasoning would permit such a surplus even in production without capital: why, then, attribute it to capital? Weiss defends marginal-productivity reasoning without accepting the explanatory primacy claimed for it by Clark and his followers. He also restores entrepreneurial choice and competitive adjustment to an apparently motionless equilibrium. The article offers a precise way to distinguish the calculation of a distributive share from an account of its cause—and to see why market prices cannot simply be translated into subjective valuations.

Would a stronger krone make Austria richer, or merely change the monetary terms in which wealth and obligations were counted? In this 1922 rejoinder to Emanuel Hugo Vogel, Alfred Amonn challenges the claim that recovery requires currency appreciation rather than stabilization. His central distinction is between a currency’s permanent exchange-rate level and the disruptive process of moving to another level. Applied to wages and taxes, it yields pointed consequences: cheaper goods do not necessarily mean greater purchasing power for workers, while unchanged nominal taxes become heavier when money appreciates. Amonn’s insistence on defined terms and causal explanations gives this polemical exchange its substance. Readers encounter both a concrete dispute over monetary recovery and the friction between analytical criticism and personal disparagement.

Where does quotation end and distortion begin? In this brief 1922 reply to Robert Liefmann, Alfred Amonn defends his criticism against a charge of falsification. His distinction is pointed: quoting necessarily removes words from their context, but that alone does not demonstrate a material alteration of meaning. He demands a side-by-side comparison of Liefmann’s text and his own allegedly falsified presentation, maintaining that no adequate example has been supplied. The statement offers a compact encounter with Amonn’s combative standard of proof—not a resolution of the dispute, but a precise account of what he insists his accuser must establish.