The archive.

Expanded from two Prague lectures, this 1935 Springer volume confronts a world in which the abandoned gold standard has left currencies isolated and distrusted, with governments reaching for devaluation as a weapon of trade policy. Devaluation, Reisch argues, is merely a valuta dumping that erodes trust and eventually raises the cost of imported inputs and of domestic goods; against it he sets an active policy for 'inländische Auslandwährung,' treating export-earned foreign exchange as a separate mass sold at differentiated rates. He develops Ernst Ružička's plan for a foreign trade bank issuing valuta bonds split into A coupons for vital imports and B coupons for dispensable ones, and offers the scheme as a faster road than devaluation toward a restored gold standard and world monetary peace.

Der Goldstandard war sozusagen die gemeinsame Sprache, das einigende Band im internationalen Handel.

English translation: “The gold standard was, so to speak, the common language, the unifying bond in international trade.”

Owning wool-producing territory does not spare manufacturers the need to buy wool. With this distinction between sovereignty and commercial access, Mises redirects the debate over international peace from colonial redistribution to restrictions on migration. In this 1935 essay, he argues that workers in high-wage countries defend their advantages by excluding poorer newcomers, exposing a conflict within claims of international labor solidarity. Yet he also contends that exclusion ultimately costs protected workers the gains of a wider division of labor. His warning to the League of Nations makes migration policy a question of peace, not merely wages. The essay offers a pointed account of how national labor protection can generate international grievances, while its racial and climatic framing of European settlement marks the historical limits of its perspective.

What the educated layman takes for the chaos of monetary science, this short foreword insists, is only a chaos of dilettantism and a tangle of political wishes — not the absence of a firm analytical apparatus. Written to introduce the German edition of D. H. Robertson's Das Geld, Schumpeter's Geleitwort defends monetary economics as possessing a genuine Organon of concepts that too few economists fully command, and commends Robertson — heir to Marshall alongside Pigou and Keynes — as a bridge for students and lay readers precisely because he helped create what he expounds and refuses to convert theory into advocacy. Science, on this account, hands the reader a tool against nonsense and nothing more; the decision it leaves to him.

Dem Laien erscheint dann als wissenschaftliches Chaos, was nur ein Chaos von Dilettantismus ist. Und er hält für hoffnungsloses Gewirr von wissenschaftlichen Meinungen, was nur ein – freilich hoffnungsloses – Gewirre von politischen Wollungen ist.

English translation: “What appears to the layman as a scientific chaos is only a chaos of dilettantism. And he takes for a hopeless tangle of scientific opinions what is only a—admittedly hopeless—tangle of political wishes.”

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.

Idle factories and falling unit costs can make monetary expansion look like an inexpensive route to recovery. In this 1935 essay, Fritz Machlup challenges the inference by asking what, precisely, “decreasing costs” means. Spreading overhead is not the same as lowering the cost of producing one more unit; technical progress is not the same as investment financed by newly created credit. These distinctions anchor his argument that declining costs do not themselves justify inflation. His perspective is not without concessions: reemployment may reduce unemployment-relief taxes and thereby benefit firms beyond those doing the hiring. Readers can discover both the conditions attached to that concession and why Machlup regards productivity-driven price declines as fundamentally different from disruptive losses.

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.