The archive.

What makes an international banking reference useful during a banking crisis? In this brief 1933 review of the 1932 survey Europäische Banken, Helene Lieser weighs the value of annually updated information against coverage limited to a few representative banks per country. Her praise centres on explanation rather than balance sheets alone: how the world crisis and currency depreciation damage credit institutions, and how rescue efforts differ across countries. From the Austrian Credit-Anstalt’s reorganisation to Swedish banks’ reckoning with the Kreuger crash, her examples identify what she finds instructive in the survey—a comparative account of banking distress and attempted repair, despite its restricted institutional coverage.

Financial translation requires more than formal equivalents: jargon and differences between British and American usage can determine a dictionary’s practical value. These are Helene Lieser’s particular concerns in her brief 1933 review of the English–German first volume of K. Th. Langguth’s Handwörterbuch des Finanzwesens. She grounds her strong recommendation in spot checks made during practical use, praising coverage useful to exporters as well as bankers. The review offers a compact statement of her criteria for a financial reference work: reliability tested in use, attention to regional terminology, and inclusion of expressions that more conventional dictionaries miss.

What keeps a stock-exchange handbook useful when the rules of finance change? In this brief 1933 review of the twenty-first edition of Salings Börsen-Papiere, Helene Lieser values legal currency as much as a clear account of securities and trading. She singles out the reproduction of statutory provisions in full and the inclusion of recent measures on interest-rate reductions, banking supervision, and the Reich flight tax. Her assessment offers a compact view of the practical demands placed on financial reference works: explaining market institutions while making their changing legal framework readily consultable, including for readers outside Germany.

Knowing why crises recur does not mean that governments will stop courting them. In this untitled German contribution to the 1933 Spiethoff Festschrift, Ludwig von Mises separates the explanatory power of business-cycle theory from its power to change policy. Cheap credit remains politically attractive, he argues, even when its consequences are understood. His critique turns on a concrete difficulty: entrepreneurs will hesitate to invest on the strength of low borrowing costs if authorities already announce their imminent withdrawal. The essay offers a compact encounter with Mises’s account of political incentives and entrepreneurial expectations, while ending on an unresolved question: whether falling prices must obstruct capital accumulation and prosperity.

What if rising productivity no longer supplied the investment opportunities needed to restore employment? In this untitled 1933 contribution to the Spiethoff Festschrift, Emil Lederer asks whether rationalization in the production of machinery and other capital goods could weaken capitalism’s familiar recovery mechanisms. Greater productive capacity might require less new investment, devalue existing equipment, and leave displaced workers without new jobs. Rather than offer technology as an all-purpose explanation of the depression, Lederer proposes a specific structural hypothesis for business-cycle research to test. His distinction between expanding physical output, increasing capital value, and creating lasting employment gives the essay its bite: readers can see why processes commonly treated as mutually reinforcing might instead come apart—and why wage cuts need not bring recovery.

A wage cut cannot create the machinery needed to employ more workers: this concrete difficulty captures Oskar Morgenstern’s challenge to business-cycle theory in his untitled 1933 contribution to the Spiethoff Festschrift. Explanations of crisis, he argues, remain limited by unfinished economic theory and by the changing institutions to which it is applied. His distinctive concern is the economy’s capacity to rearrange actual goods and productive resources over time—a conception of liquidity extending well beyond banks. The essay connects this problem to a pointed warning: neither intervention nor nonintervention can derive reliable prescriptions simply by repeating propositions framed for free competition and unrestricted mobility. Readers encounter a research programme that makes theoretical ambition inseparable from scrutiny of material constraints and empirical conditions.

Statistical patterns can describe a business cycle without explaining why it occurs. In this short contribution to the 1933 Spiethoff Festschrift, Hans Mayer presses that distinction while questioning what a general theory of crises could actually establish. His test case is the inability to sell goods at prices that cover costs: can its recurrence be derived from the basic conditions of an exchange economy? Mayer’s distinctive move is to turn the demand for rigorous causal explanation back upon the assumption of rational entrepreneurial conduct. Profit-seeking alone determines neither foresight nor responses to cheap credit and technical change. The essay lets readers examine a precise methodological tension: economic dynamics requires more than historical description, yet its general premises may leave the decisive entrepreneurial choices unexplained.

Idle machinery and unemployed workers, rather than an excess of goods, define depression for Oskar Engländer. In this short contribution to the 1933 Spiethoff Festschrift, that shift sharpens a crucial distinction: describing a slump is not the same as explaining why expansion repeatedly turns into contraction. Engländer traces instability to the accelerated growth of production-goods industries, while acknowledging that the blockage of capital at the turning point still requires explanation. His policy argument is more definite: recovery needs purchasing power, not wage cuts or increased saving; when cheap credit cannot overcome poor profit expectations, direct employment creation becomes necessary. The essay offers a compact encounter with the tension between an explicitly incomplete account of cyclical causation and a firm case for action against idle resources.

What should a discussion of value theory put first? In this brief procedural intervention, Ludwig von Mises urges a direct confrontation between subjectivist value theory and two prominent alternatives in Germany: Cassel’s approach, which raises the question whether price theory can dispense with value theory, and Spann’s universalism, whose circulation Mises describes as exceptional. He does not settle either dispute; he argues that avoiding them would leave the discussion detached from its immediate intellectual setting. The contribution offers a compact glimpse of Mises choosing his interlocutors—and distinguishing the theoretical challenge posed by a doctrine from the attention demanded by its public reach.

What would make a planned economy more productive—and by whose measure? In this 1933 review of Carl Landauer, presented in its 1997 English translation, Hayek presses two questions: how competing individual needs could become a single standard of social satisfaction, and how state-owned enterprises could choose investments without a free capital market. His respect for Landauer’s theoretical knowledge sharpens rather than softens the disagreement. He also challenges a comparison that judges markets by their observed defects while granting planning its imagined successes. This brief encounter lets readers see how Hayek connects disputes over valuation to concrete institutional choices: retaining trade between enterprises, he argues, does not by itself explain how productive resources would be allocated.

All this assumes an unambiguous yardstick for global social satisfaction, which does not in fact yet exist.

Equal rules can still look like measures aimed at a single country. In this brief letter to The Times, first published in 1933 and reprinted in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek considers how that suspicion might obstruct German acceptance of international arms controls. His proposal turns on sequence: France, Great Britain and other willing powers should first submit themselves to mutual supervision, testing its effectiveness before seeking wider participation. The letter offers no technical inspection plan; its interest lies in Hayek’s distinction between formally universal rules and demonstrated reciprocity. It captures a concrete diplomatic wager: that controls already accepted by others would be harder for Germany to reject as discriminatory.

Can wage cuts help restore employment without shrinking the purchasing power on which recovery depends? In this 1933 lecture, Alfred Amonn answers by distinguishing wage rates from total wage income, and relative prices from the general price level. His case is not for indiscriminate deflation: he argues that reducing still-high manufactured-goods prices could revive sales and demand for raw materials whose prices had already collapsed. With monetary means held constant and productive capacity idle, he maintains, lower prices can support greater output, while expanding employment may offset lower wage rates. The revealing tension lies between this proposed outcome and the disruptive transition towards it. Amonn acknowledges postponed purchases and international obstacles, but gives priority to completed adjustment—a choice that makes the lecture a focused statement of the assumptions behind his defence of price and wage reductions.