The archive.

Fairness to rival theories can become a failure to distinguish their explanatory weight. This tension shapes Fritz Machlup’s 1935 review of Howard S. Ellis’s German Monetary Theory, 1905–1933. Machlup welcomes Ellis’s organization around monetary problems rather than individual thinkers, finding in his treatment of cash balances and velocity genuine advances in analysis. But he challenges Ellis’s handling of German inflation: qualifications about exchange rates and foreign demand should not obscure monetary authorities’ responsibility or the magnitude of depreciation. The review offers a compact encounter with Machlup’s standards of economic criticism—precise concepts, careful causal reasoning, and historical proportion—and shows why a generous synthesis may still require a sharper judgement between competing explanations.

Having the law in print is not the same as knowing how to apply it. In this brief 1935 review of Harold Rasch’s collection of German foreign-exchange legislation, Helene Lieser endorses the introduction’s warning that statutory texts alone cannot resolve practical difficulties of interpretation. Her pointed observation is that important provisions also reside in administrative instructions to officials. The review identifies a concrete limit of legal compilation—and explains why Lieser awaits the promised commentary rather than treating access to the statutes as sufficient guidance.

For Helene Lieser, a guide to foreign-exchange law must help readers navigate obstacles to trade, not merely collect regulations. Her brief 1935 review of Heinrich Troeger’s second, revised edition notes its emphasis on German rules, including import prohibitions, alongside coverage of foreign exchange law beyond Germany. The distinctive touch is her closing image: the subject index becomes Ariadne’s thread through a labyrinth with more than one Minotaur. This compact notice shows how Lieser frames the handbook’s practical purpose while suggesting the hazards that make orderly legal information necessary.

When technical improvements lower prices, does the increased purchasing power of existing cash balances count as saving—and does it justify credit expansion to keep prices stable? In this 1935 comment, reprinted in 1993, Karl Bode and Gottfried Haberler challenge Harrod’s affirmative case by separating deliberate cash accumulation from the appreciation of money already held. Their objection is not to monetary expansion in all circumstances, but to deriving a policy requirement from inconsistent definitions of saving and investment. They also question whether anticipated income growth necessarily induces people to hold more cash rather than spend more freely. This tightly focused dispute offers a concrete lesson in monetary reasoning: an accounting relationship cannot establish how people will behave, and revalued wealth cannot be compared uncritically with expenditure on new capital.

Can unused productive capacity be an equilibrium outcome, or will producers keep expanding to avoid losing customers? In this review of Edward Chamberlin’s The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, Emil Lederer welcomes the challenge to perfect-competition theory but questions the behavior assumed by its cost and demand curves. Rivals may retaliate, outsiders may enter, and expectations of “normal” profit may change. His distinctive concern is the gap between a possible market configuration and the decisions needed to sustain it. Advertising sharpens another distinction: an enterprise can gain sales by diverting purchasing power without increasing society’s consumption. The review connects price theory to a concrete problem of economic efficiency—why resources and productive capacity may remain underused even when individual firms appear to have reached equilibrium.

It is difficult to understand how a further expansion of production can be avoided, unless a real monopoly, i.e. an organization of the producers, has been built up.

How can an economy suffer a shortage of capital while capital goods stand unused? In this 1935 essay, Hayek locates the contradiction in investment plans whose completion requires resources consumers are unwilling to release. Credit expansion, he argues, can make long-term commitments appear viable without any corresponding willingness to postpone consumption. The resulting crisis exposes incompatible expectations, not merely isolated entrepreneurial mistakes. The essay is also an exercise in theoretical revision: Hayek questions his earlier reliance on changes in an aggregate capital stock and turns instead to the timing of production and consumption. Readers can follow how this shift connects monetary disturbances to unfinished investments—and why explaining how prices shape expectations remains, by Hayek’s own admission, an unresolved task.

Assembled from roughly three hundred pre-war price series across England, Germany, the United States and beyond, this statistical study argues that the trade cycle cannot be read off any single index number. Published in Vienna by Springer with a foreword by Oskar Morgenstern and backing from the Austrian Institute for Trade Cycle Research and the London School of Economics, Tintner applies Anderson's Variate Difference Method and moving averages to decompose each series into trend, cyclical and seasonal components. His finding is that prices move unevenly — metals and interest rates on their own rhythm, textiles and foodstuffs on another — so that the notion of a general price level dissolves. He offers the results not as proof of causes but as ordered material for the theorist, cautiously favouring the monetary cycle theories of Wicksell, Mises and Hayek.

We consider time, on the contrary, only as a kind of auxiliary variable, which we must eliminate in order to bring out the economic relations.

Frank Knight's assault on the Austrian period of production provokes this sharp rejoinder, in which Machlup concedes the term's clumsiness while rescuing the concept it names. Capital, he insists against Knight, is not perpetual: maintenance may be assumed in a stationary model but cannot be smuggled in when the very question is whether capital is preserved, enlarged, or consumed. Renaming it the period of investment, he locates it on the input side—productive services carrying consumption distances—and shows that neither construction time nor average durability exhausts its meaning. The payoff is business-cycle theory: credit expansion stretches the investment period beyond what voluntary saving would support, so the crisis springs from a divergence between individual time preferences and the time structure of production, not from monetary mishap alone.

To explain unemployment (through wage stickiness) is one thing; to explain the business cycle is another.

How can an observer describe character without merely recording personal prejudices? In this research questionnaire, preserved here from the 1950 republication of its parent volume, Richard C. Thurnwald turns from general judgments about African populations to the conduct of identifiable people: keeping promises, receiving gifts, facing danger, working, and grieving. He asks for concrete examples and biographical context, and advises investigators not to “correct” African informants’ replies. Yet the instrument’s supplied alternatives—such as working for money or only for necessities—also constrain what observers can recognize. Read as a proposal for inquiry rather than a report of findings, this appendix makes a precise methodological tension visible: the effort to discipline character assessment through evidence, and the assumptions already built into the questions.

In order to evade the lure of subjectivity and onesidedness it seemed advisable to ask only for the behaviour of one single person in certain situations.

Written as the world crisis drove Russia, Italy, Roosevelt's America and Nazi Germany toward state direction of production, these expanded 1935 newspaper essays, here in German translation, ask precisely what 'planned economy' means and where regulation ends and collectivism begins. Engliš distinguishes three rational orders, individualist, cooperative and solidarist, and defines regulated economy as intervention from above that displaces competitive prices while leaving private enterprise and its calculation intact. The decisive threshold is what he calls the critical point: once the state assumes economic responsibility for outcomes, guaranteeing work or absorbing losses, entrepreneurship dissolves and the slide into collectivization begins. Weighing regulation against democratic institutions and Czechoslovakia's dependence on exports, the argument shares its ground with the interwar planning and calculation debates of Mises and Hayek.

Welche Änderungen des Ordnungsprinzipes der Unternehmerproduktion zur regulierten Wirtschaft gehören, ist unsere Kardinalfrage, wir suchen also das Wesen der regulierten Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Which alterations of the ordering principle of entrepreneurial production belong to the regulated economy is our cardinal question; we are therefore seeking the essence of the regulated economy.”

What makes a securities directory useful to bankers and prospective investors? In this brief 1935 review of the seventeenth edition of Annuaire Desfossés, Helene Lieser values practical coverage and ease of consultation. Comparing the annual to the familiar Compass, she notes its company data and latest published balance sheets for both listed and unlisted shares traded in Paris. Brokerage rates, transaction taxes and a market index also figure in her assessment. The review offers a compact account of the information Lieser considered useful for navigating the Paris securities market—not investment advice, but a judgement of the reference tools available to those seeking it.

Which provisions matter most to a banker navigating competition law? In this brief review of Hans Roppert and Georg Weis’s documentary guide to Czechoslovak financial regulation, Helene Lieser distinguishes the assembled legal framework from the rules that govern practice. She singles out the government announcement establishing competition standards and its tables of maximum deposit interest rates, noting their structural similarity to Austrian tables. Her practical emphasis offers a compact glimpse of how a legal reference work could help bankers locate operative constraints among statutes, explanatory materials and conciliation procedures.