The archive.

Foreign credit can accelerate reconstruction—but what happens when the borrowing surge subsides? In this brief conference intervention, Karl Schlesinger challenges the alignment of profitable investment with economic stability. Germany’s rush to make up deferred investment, he argues, creates an exceptional demand for foreign capital whose eventual decline will force disruptive price reductions. He also questions the security of long-term borrowing: fear of war could send investors fleeing, depressing bond prices even where loans cannot immediately be recalled. His distinctive concern is not simply whether foreign funds are available, but how investor memory and the timing of reconstruction make dependence on them hazardous. The contribution offers a compact case for pacing investment recovery rather than treating every individually advantageous project as an immediate economic gain.

Does capitalism’s increasing organization signal its exhaustion—or merely a change in how it grows? In this conference intervention, originally published in 1929, Emil Lederer challenges Werner Sombart’s diagnosis of “late capitalism” by separating organizational change from declining dynamism. Large family-based enterprises in China and Japan unsettle a European chronology built around the individual entrepreneur: what looks like old age in one setting may accompany capitalism’s beginnings elsewhere. Yet Lederer also resists making modern technology proof of capitalism’s permanence. A socialist economy would still need cotton spindles; its distinguishing feature would be the social organization of production. This brief contribution offers a pointed way to examine claims of economic decline without confusing technical capacities, business structures, and the social relations that sustain them.

Explaining a credit-driven boom is not the same as endorsing it. In this brief conference intervention, published in 1929, Frankfurt bank director L. Albert Hahn defends monetary business-cycle theory while affirming his opposition to credit-fuelled expansion. Drawing on banking practice, especially in London, he challenges the notion that monetary explanations are merely theorists’ inventions. He also asks what a theory of the cycle should explain: every disturbance caused by war, commodity markets or accident, or a more specific recurring pattern? His focus on prewar cycles accompanied by rising prices exposes how selecting the phenomena can shape the explanation. The contribution offers a compact encounter with a banker separating policy judgement from economic analysis—and defending monetary theory without claiming to settle causal priority.

Does expanding credit cause an economic upswing, or does it accommodate growth already under way? In this brief conference intervention, Emil Lederer challenges Schlesinger’s banking-centred explanation by reconnecting monetary movements with productive capacity, technical possibilities and costs. His pointed analogy—letting out clothes does not cause their wearer to grow stouter—exposes the danger of confusing accommodation with causation. Yet credit is not merely passive: once induced by productive opportunities, it can enable further expansion. The sharpest test comes from falling costs, which, Lederer argues, can allow production to grow without additional credit. This compact exchange offers a precise distinction between a condition that enables growth and a cause that initiates it.

Why should a halt to credit expansion become an actual contraction? In this conference discussion contribution, published in 1929, Karl Schlesinger presses a gap in explanations that move too quickly from strained bank liquidity to falling lending. His answer turns on delays: banks discover the effects of interest-rate changes only gradually, while entrepreneurs judge borrowing against expected profits that may remain high because wages and other costs lag behind product prices. Distinguishing these perceived returns from an equilibrium rate, he shows how belated adjustments can turn stability into contraction. The contribution offers a compact encounter between monetary theory and banking practice, and a concrete reason to distinguish rising prices from the changing profit margins that can sustain—or undermine—an expansion.

Business-cycle theories may be easier to distinguish than the theorists who hold them. In this brief 1929 review of Alvin Harvey Hansen’s Business-Cycle Theory, Gottfried Haberler endorses Hansen’s refusal to draw a rigid boundary between monetary and non-monetary explanations, yet questions the usefulness of a classification in which the same authors repeatedly reappear. His pointed objection to the placement of harvest theories makes the difficulty concrete: does locating cyclical effects within capitalism adequately distinguish their causes? Haberler’s discriminating appraisal separates orderly presentation from substantive insight, reserving his praise for Hansen’s detailed analysis, especially his criticism of Foster and Catchings. The review offers a compact example of Haberler judging competing explanations without forcing their proponents into exclusive camps.

Does an elastic banking system necessarily generate business cycles? In this 1929 review of Friedrich A. Hayek’s Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie, Wilhelm Röpke welcomes a monetary explanation that looks beyond the general price level to credit creation and interest rates, but stops short of endorsing its exclusive claims. Writing as a monetary theorist himself, he asks whether changes in real accumulation can also disturb equilibrium and challenges Hayek’s reliance on automatic market adjustment, particularly in agriculture. His response offers a compact encounter with monetary theory under internal scrutiny: agreement on the importance of commercial-bank credit leaves open both the necessity of recurring fluctuations and the scope for policies to moderate them.

Does calling an economy “dynamic” help explain interest, or merely shift the terms of the problem? In this review of Gerhard Heinze’s comparison of Cassel, Schumpeter, and Böhm-Bawerk, Hayek singles out unstable concepts as a weakness in rival explanations. He endorses Heinze’s pointed observation that entrepreneurial creativity is itself a datum, just as the valuations of agents in a static economy are. Yet his approval is discriminating: neglecting Wicksell weakens the discussion of bank and real interest, while other omissions leave important alternatives unexamined. This brief review shows why Hayek judged Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation stronger than Cassel’s and Schumpeter’s without treating it as immune to criticism: logical consistency and closeness to economic facts matter more than claims to theoretical novelty.

Higher wages for some workers cannot simply compensate for unemployment among others: this distinction anchors Hayek’s appreciation of Richard Strigl’s analysis of collective bargaining. In this short 1929 review, presented in English translation, Hayek praises applied economics that refines theoretical assumptions rather than merely popularising them. Strigl’s experience observing wage negotiations supplies concrete institutional differences and frictions that abstract models can miss. Hayek’s approval is discriminating: he challenges an argument that production can absorb artificially increased wages when its success depends on later capital accumulation. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards of economic explanation—attentive to bargaining power and customary profits, yet insistent that an adjustment argument account for the conditions that make adjustment possible.

Cheap credit promises more investment—but what happens when the projects it encourages exceed the capital available to sustain them? In this discussion address, delivered in Zürich in 1928 and first published in 1929, Ludwig von Mises links the business cycle to entrepreneurs’ calculations under artificially lowered interest rates. His distinctive emphasis is on bank-created credit, rather than increases in money generally: expansion makes otherwise unprofitable ventures appear viable, while public pressure for lower rates helps explain why the process recurs. Preserved here in facsimile republication, the address brings theoretical explanation into direct contact with banking practice. Readers can examine both Mises’s case for early restraint and his reservations about price stabilization as a straightforward remedy.

Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.

„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.

English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”

Cheap rents can protect sitting tenants while making housing harder to obtain for those outside the protected stock. In this 1929 pamphlet, republished here in 2001, Friedrich August von Hayek examines that tension through Austrian rent protection, tracing how fixed tenancies can obstruct household moves, access to business premises, and changes in production. His distinctive concern is not landlords’ entitlement to income but rents’ role in directing scarce space toward changing uses. Restoring that role, he argues, need not mean returning all rental income to owners. Nor does he promise that abolishing controls would immediately revive construction or undo accumulated distortions. The work offers a pointed distinction between protecting particular occupants and coordinating housing provision, while acknowledging the transition losses that complicate reform.