The archive.

"You cannot eat your cake and keep it too" - the English proverb frames Schumpeter's cool assessment of Austria's credit plan and its League of Nations supervision. Foreign oversight may be humiliating, he concedes, but Austria humiliated itself; control is the consequence of an inability to stabilize alone, not an external injustice. His central move shifts the argument from honor to sequence. Domestic consolidation would demand restoring the budget first, then creditworthiness, then the currency and a note-issuing bank - a very painful path. Foreign credit reverses that order, letting stabilization begin with the currency rather than end with it, provided the krone is merely stabilized and never raised. Even so, an industrial crisis is unavoidable, and the slightest fiscal error could yield a catastrophe worse than the present.

Ein Geschenk wird uns sicher nicht gemacht.

English translation: “We are certainly not being given a gift.”

Surplus raw materials and unmet needs coexist in the postwar economy: could guaranteed purchases reconnect production with demand? In this 1922 newspaper article, Emil Lederer scrutinizes a reconstruction proposal advanced by the English periodical The Nation. International, government-backed consortia would buy commodities when prices were depressed, restoring producers’ ability to purchase other goods. Lederer’s distinctive move is to identify these purchases as loans against uncertain future sales: stored coffee or other raw materials cannot provide the same monetary backing as gold. Yet he does not dismiss intervention, which might avert production cuts and prolonged scarcity. The article makes visible the financial risks beneath an apparently straightforward stabilization scheme—and explains why, in Lederer’s judgement, reconstruction requires stronger economies to bear substantial costs.

The scandal, for a scientific mind, is moral philosophy: dozens of competing systems, nearly identical practical conclusions, demonstrations built on undefined terms. Rueff's remedy, in this 1922 essay prefaced by Clément Colson, is to deny any real division among the sciences. Geometry, mechanics, physics, morality, and political economy share one structure — empirical laws drawn from experience, then "causes" constructed through axioms and definitions so that deduction can recover those laws; building a science is thus a création des causes. Moral doctrines become géométries morales, and utilitarianism, interventionism, and Marxian socialism appear as non-Euclidean systems, logically coherent yet untrue to present social conditions. Drawing on Walras but recasting need and utility as created causes rather than psychological measurements, Rueff sketches a statistical mathematical economics: no more a political economy of the individual than a thermodynamics of the molecule.

Dire qu'une théorie morale est vraie, c'est une affirmation qui n'a aucun sens.

English translation: “To say that a moral theory is true is an assertion that has no meaning whatever.”

How could socialism become a German national vocation while Marxist class struggle was rejected? In this 1922 essay, Karl Pribram locates the answer in the conceptual kinship of class and nation: both, he argues, turn groups of individuals into collective agents whose purposes claim authority over their members. His distinctive concern is not simply the convergence of political programmes, but the reasoning that makes devotion to one collective transferable to another. This perspective gives concrete force to his account of democracy’s difficulties: constitutional change need not displace parties’ claims to embody binding national or class purposes. Readers can discover how an inquiry into social concepts becomes a criticism of political authority and economic organization, while Pribram insists on testing doctrines for internal contradictions rather than dismissing their premises outright.

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.