The archive.

A sudden fall in prices might be less damaging to investment than years of gradual decline: this is Felix Somary’s counterintuitive contention in his brief 1918 discussion intervention on a one-time wealth levy. His reasoning turns on concrete wartime conditions—depleted inventories and limited trade credit—which, he argues, would reduce the immediate danger of bankruptcies after peace, while prolonged uncertainty would discourage investment and repeated wage cuts would sustain social conflict. Somary assesses the levy not simply as a charge on accumulated wealth, but through its possible effects on export competitiveness and the Reichsbank’s capacity to conduct discount policy. This complete contribution from the proceedings offers a compact encounter with an economist weighing fiscal reconstruction by its consequences for productive recovery, rather than by the distribution of the tax burden alone.

Should a wealth levy fall on companies or on their shareholders? In this brief intervention in the 1918 proceedings on reorganising German public finance, Felix Somary makes the choice of taxpayer a question of both administrative feasibility and fairness. Insisting that double taxation must be avoided, he favours assessing companies: they can be identified more readily and comprehensively, whereas assessments of individual shareholders would depend on stock-market prices at selected dates. His remarks offer a compact view of how valuation methods shape tax equity, without pretending that company taxation is free of difficulties.

War has already destroyed wealth; should postwar taxation acknowledge that loss at once or distribute it through permanent charges? In this complete discussion intervention from 1918, Felix Somary defends a one-time wealth levy by exposing the fragility beneath apparently abundant bank deposits and war bonds. Banks, he argues, cannot supply liquidity independently when their assets are chiefly claims on an overburdened state. His distinctive case links private credit to public solvency: accepting a defined capital loss could restore confidence more effectively than preserving nominal fortunes while leaving fiscal obligations unresolved. Responses to objections about mortgages, foreign investors and capital flight show where this proposal encounters practical resistance—and how much its feasibility depends on a brief postwar window for implementation.

A wealth levy can be fair in its design yet cumbersome to collect. In this brief 1918 discussion intervention, Felix Somary argues for taxing companies rather than their individual shareholders, placing administrative reach and speed ahead of finely adjusted personal assessments. He acknowledges the cost: a small investor holding only shares might indirectly bear a higher rate than their circumstances warrant. But he considers that disadvantage outweighed by simpler collection, lower costs, and stronger resistance to evasion. His pointed example of war-profits tax assessments arriving eighteen months after enactment gives the argument its practical urgency. This compact source lets readers examine a fiscal choice in which the machinery of collection is not an afterthought but a decisive consideration.

Must wartime price increases be reversed before foreign trade can recover? In this review of Robert Liefmann’s study of monetary expansion, Alfred Amonn challenges that prescription by distinguishing exchange-rate stability from restoration of a lower price level. He accepts that new money raises prices through incomes and demand, but disputes Liefmann’s claim to have discovered this mechanism. His sharper objection concerns causation: he treats rising domestic prices and currency depreciation as parallel effects of monetary expansion, rather than the former as the cause of the latter. The review offers a compact encounter with economic criticism in practice, showing why higher import prices measured in marks do not, in Amonn’s argument, necessarily mean paying more in goods or labor.

A monopoly designed to cheapen Vienna’s meat supply failed when Hungarian cattle suppliers boycotted its market. In this 1918 review of Karl von Peez’s study of the Landsverleger-Compagnia (1622–1624), Eugen Peter Schwiedland reads archival business history through the pressures of First World War provisioning. He singles out currency depreciation, price ceilings and dependence on external producers as points of comparison, while praising Peez’s use of company accounts and official scrutiny. The tension is concrete: imperial privilege and a sovereign’s share in the profits could not secure control over supply. This brief review offers a focused encounter with Schwiedland’s economic-historical judgement—particularly his attention to the constraints that cross-border trade placed on wartime price regulation.

Property, in this second edition of 1918, is an institution 'of overriding, all-dominating effect' whose usefulness is inseparable from its dangers — dependency, class power, and duty. Schwiedland separates factual possession from socially recognized right, then follows the tacit proviso that binds ownership — Paulsen's clause that the community may dispose otherwise where welfare requires — through agrarian history: from village use-rights, Flurzwang, and Allmende to the conquest-born great estate that concentrates power and hardens social ranks. Urban land becomes speculative capital, movable wealth becomes securities and industrial enterprise, and inheritance law carries wealth and position to descendants. Surveying personality, legal, labour, and utility theories, he finds each partial and settles on social usefulness as the only decisive ground, defending rent limits, inheritance restrictions, and expropriation where ownership threatens the common welfare.

Der Großbesitz ist der Ausdruck, aber auch ein Anreger der gesellschaftlichen Klassenscheidung.

English translation: “Large property is the expression, but also an instigator, of class division in society.”

A currency can keep payments moving while shifting the cost of what it buys onto those compelled to accept it. In this 1918 article, Alfred Amonn examines that tension through the occupation lei issued in Romania against deposits at the Reichsbank. His distinction between financial backing and purchasing power explains why those deposits neither guaranteed redemption nor prevented inflation. The decisive question is who ultimately pays: under the peace settlement he describes, Romania would assume the note issue, freeing the occupiers’ deposits. Amonn judges the arrangement operationally successful while explicitly identifying its role in economic exploitation. His account lets readers trace how bank deposits, exchange rules and redemption obligations turned an instrument of everyday circulation into a means of transferring occupation costs.

Against the wartime cry that 1914 had rendered economics obsolete, this 1917/18 essay treats the currency crisis as an intensified version of recurrent problems and sets out to salvage what metallists, nominalists, quantity theorists, and Knapp had each seen rightly. Money, for Schumpeter, is a claim-ticket, an Anweisung, on a social product that consists solely of consumption goods; its purchasing power rests neither on metal nor on state decree but on the goods it commands. From a broadened definition of money and a notion of velocity recast as efficiency, he derives the fundamental equation E = M·U, equating the income sum with the price-sum of the social product. Most consequential is his account of bank credit, which creates purchasing power before the goods it finances exist, forcing a kind of saving and driving capitalist development while breeding inflation, booms, and crises.

In der Kreation solchen Geldes liegt das Wesen des modernen Kredits.

English translation: “In the creation of such money lies the essence of modern credit.”

How could overseas colonial possession count as economic self-sufficiency? In this 1918 article, Richard Thurnwald treats the wartime blockade as evidence that Germany must recover and develop New Guinea to secure tropical raw materials. Drawing on his travels, he grounds that demand in concrete assessments of coconut plantations, mineral deposits, transport, and labour. The revealing tension lies between his attention to workers’ food, wages, and treatment and his racialized proposals for importing and settling labourers. Conservation, too, serves a programme of intensified extraction rather than an alternative to it. The article shows how practical knowledge of colonial production becomes an argument for territorial entitlement, while Indigenous ownership and political wishes remain outside the reckoning.

Legal protection did not necessarily give Austria’s wartime salaried employees power over their working conditions. In this 1918 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines that gap through legislation and the practical resources of employee associations. Bank employees could sustain resistance funds and win salary concessions; technical employees, despite professional standing, faced restricted mobility, unpaid overtime and unilateral changes to contracts. Lederer’s comparison with Germany challenges the assumption that salaried employment necessarily favoured conservative organization: Austria’s less extensive associations could also be more receptive to radical unionism. His account makes concrete the difference between securing an entitlement and possessing the solidarity to enforce it, while showing how demands for minimum salaries brought employees into cooperation with workers’ unions.

With the German Reich facing ruin at the war's end, Somary sets aside whether a capital levy of a fifth or a quarter of national wealth can be justified and asks only how it could actually be carried out. His answer treats emergency taxation as financial engineering: a managed conversion of wealth that avoids forced liquidation, drains inflationary money, and transfers capital to the Reich through verifiable, self-declared valuations. Agricultural land could be taken in kind and resettled on war invalids; a National Ground-Charge Bank would issue Pfandbriefe against priority land charges, a National Securities and Industrial Bank four classes of obligations, and these privately backed instruments, exchanged against war loans, would quietly convert public debt into private claims. He rejects fiscal co-ownership of enterprise, insisting the spheres of state monopoly and private business stay separate lest each corrupt the other.

Soll nicht die Wirtschaft den Staat und der Staat die Wirtschaft korrompieren, so muß das Gebiet des Staatsmonopols und das der Privatunternehmung vorerst getrennt bleiben.

English translation: “If the economy is not to corrupt the state and the state the economy, then the sphere of state monopoly and that of private enterprise must for the time being remain separate.”