The archive.

Written for the Berliner Börsen-Courier at the close of 1925, this short essay takes up the anti-inflation orthodoxy of post-stabilization Germany, raise taxes and tighten credit, and turns it against itself. Both tools, Schumpeter grants, were necessary to defend the currency, yet excessive taxation and monetary tightening can paralyze production and deepen unemployment; necessity is not success, and the patient's condition is what matters. His conceptual move is to detach credit policy from the narrow role of servant to the exchange rate. Because the value of money and the tempo of development depend on bank-created means of payment rather than on gold stocks and savings alone, credit becomes an instrument of therapy. The program is selective, not loose: channel credit to firms with real futures, expand capacity, and cut unemployment without endangering the currency.

Man kann damit Konjunkturen schaffen und verhindern, Produktionszweige fördern und drosseln, Richtung und Temperatur der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung diktieren.

English translation: “By this means one can create and prevent booms, promote and throttle branches of production, dictate the direction and temperature of economic development.”

An equation can balance without explaining why prices change. In this 1925 article, Gottfried Haberler makes that distinction the basis of a critical engagement with Schumpeter’s monetary theory. Counting only purchases that deliver goods to final consumers gives monetary velocity a special meaning: hoarded money and funds circulating solely in capital markets contribute nothing to the relevant expenditure total. Haberler shows why such definitions preserve an accounting identity without establishing causal dependence. He extends the challenge to money’s “objective” exchange value, arguing that a general price level depends on how and for what purpose prices are combined. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish useful monetary shorthand from an aggregate mistakenly treated as an independent economic force.

If a preference is inferred from an exchange, can that same preference explain why the exchange occurred? Felix Kaufmann’s 1925 article makes such circularities central to its examination of economic theory. He distinguishes the concepts that define economic activity from the evidence needed to explain it, bringing an analysis of intentional action to bear on Austrian marginal utility theory. For Kaufmann, rankings of intended uses can guide inquiry, but cannot become necessary truths merely because they make choices intelligible. His scrutiny of economic measurement likewise locates substantive knowledge in the assumptions behind equations, not simply in their solution. The result offers a concrete way to distinguish what an economic model defines, what it assumes, and what it actually explains—without asking logic to replace empirical research.

A decade of stagnation, the young Hayek observes, had settled over general economic theory since Wieser's great synthesis seemed to leave nothing further to do—until Leo Schönfeld's Grenznutzen und Wirtschaftsrechnung. This 1925 review, here in English translation, greets that book as a genuine reopening of the field. What draws Hayek is Schönfeld's attempt to ground marginal utility not in a fixed, independent system of needs but in the process of economic calculation itself, distinguishing a logically complete theoretical reckoning from the abbreviated procedures of practice and building outward through combinations of decisions, isolated individual utilities, and a principle of economic quid pro quo. Hayek doubts whether maximum total utility can really be found by comparing isolated utilities, yet judges the work unusually mature and exact—regretting only that its promised later volumes never appeared.

It was also to remain the last noteworthy achievement in this field for a long time.

Does Ricardo’s abstraction from motives other than self-interest amount to a claim about human nature? Franz Xaver Weiss argues that it does not: isolating causes is a theoretical procedure, not an exhaustive portrait of conduct. In this critical article, he challenges ideological readings of Ricardo before examining Alfred Amonn’s 1924 introduction. His defence is discriminating rather than unconditional. Production time and capital profit, he argues, lead Ricardo beyond strict labour-value doctrine, while deficiencies in the treatment of demand remain real. Even a landlord’s renunciation of rent becomes a test of interpretive precision: a proposition about grain prices says nothing by itself against altruism. Readers can discover how reconstructing an economist’s premises changes the assessment of both his achievements and his errors.

Not whether the state can decree a price, but what follows when a decreed price is meant to replace the one the market would form: that is the question this theoretical essay on official price fixing pursues within an order still based on private ownership. Mises distinguishes Ordnungstaxen, which hover near the market price and barely disturb it, from genuine controls that push maximum or minimum prices away from the unhampered level. A ceiling breeds shortage, hoarding, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a wage floor breeds unsold labor. Each isolated intervention forces a choice between retreat and further command. Price fixing, he concludes, is no stable third system between capitalism and socialism but cumulative social theory. Reprinted as Theorie der Preistaxen.

Der behördlich festgelegte Preis aber zerstört den Markt, auf dem Waren und Dienste gegen Geld gekauft und verkauft werden.

English translation: “The officially fixed price, however, destroys the market on which goods and services are bought and sold for money.”

State ownership does not by itself make an industrial strategy. In this short review of Felix Guggenheim’s study, Emil Lederer considers how the Reich’s collection of wartime factories and inflation-era investments became the industrial group Viag. He commends Guggenheim’s descriptive restraint while emphasizing a pointed distinction: a holding company must be more than a government office in corporate form. Commercial accounting, managerial flexibility, and entrepreneurial direction could, in Lederer’s account, operate within public ownership. The concrete test was Viag’s concentration on electrical and related industries and its disposal of unrelated holdings. The review offers a compact account of the difference between possessing industrial assets and directing their development.

A securities handbook’s revisions provide Helene Lieser with concrete measures of change after German currency stabilization. In this short 1925 review of Parts I and II of Salings Börsenpapiere for 1925/26, she values current financial information but looks beyond its usefulness to traders. She particularly welcomes the new compilation of German corporate groups as a resource for studying the economy and hopes it will grow. Her sharpest observation concerns a shrinking section: newly added securities occupy less than one page, against three the previous year. The review shows what Lieser sought in a capital-market reference—and how even its changing proportions could register economic conditions.

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.