The archive.

Factories, workers, and materials may be available while the credit needed to bring them together is not. In this article on Czechoslovakia’s credit shortage, Alfred Amonn asks why issuing money for productive lending might nevertheless worsen the predicament. He grants that industrial expansion could benefit workers and consumers, but distinguishes that promise from the immediate pressures new spending would place on prices, foreign exchange, and currency reserves. His diagnosis shifts attention from an apparent shortage of notes to the state’s absorption of bank funds for consumption; his remedy is repayment rather than monetary creation. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish industrial distress from monetary insufficiency—and to understand why defending an appreciated currency could require further domestic restraint.

From a single household's valuations through exchange, money, capital, prices and interest to population, currency, credit and the cartelized modern economy, this systematic handbook follows the whole arc of provision for life. Here in the German rendering of Engliš's 1925 Czech lectures, the Brno economist and Czechoslovak finance minister grounds every category in purpose and means, deliberately omitting statistics so the doctrine will not date. He parts sharply from the Austrians: marginal utility, he argues, measures the value of a loss and cannot explain why a particular good is bought. Malthus, Gresham's law, bimetallism and the wartime paper inflations of central Europe all find their place within a framework that treats price above all as a regulator holding production and consumption in balance.

Ohne Zweck gibt es keine Nützlichkeit.

English translation: “Without a purpose there is no utility.”

Viewed from neutral, republican Geneva — a city shaped by religious refuge and small-state vulnerability — the League of Nations appears to Rappard not as one institution but as three uneasily combined: a League to execute the peace treaties, a League to promote cooperation, and a League to outlaw war. Across these lectures he weighs each function with an insider's candor, praising the Permanent Mandates Commission and the financial reconstruction of Austria while exposing the weakness of Articles 10 and 16, whose sanctions collapsed at Vilna and Corfu once Germany, Russia, and above all the United States stood outside. War cannot be outlawed, he insists, until an impartial legal alternative exists for every dispute; the Permanent Court, not coercive force, is the League's most durable achievement. He closes with an appeal for American participation.

As municipal law is the sole protection of widows and orphans, so is international law, in the last resort, the sole protection of small nations.

Restoring a currency’s gold value is not the same as restoring economic stability. This distinction drives Martha Stephanie Braun’s 1925 assessment of international monetary conferences and their unfinished work. She supports ending inflation, balancing budgets, and freeing foreign-exchange markets, yet accepts warnings against the unemployment and disruption caused by forcing depreciated currencies back to prewar parity. Her defense of gold is therefore also an argument for shared management: central banks must coordinate policy and distribute the costs of maintaining reserves rather than leave responsibility chiefly to Britain and the United States. The article offers a concrete way to examine the tension between a common monetary anchor and national policy discretion—and to understand why, for Braun, currency stabilization cannot by itself moderate economic fluctuations.

From the Bank of England's slow evolution, from privileged private bank to bankers' bank to guardian of the currency, Schumpeter draws a lesson against the reformers: central-bank rules grew organically from the needs of capitalist money, not from theory, and discount policy can correct small disturbances but not panic or structural impoverishment. Across four sections this 1925 article defends the return to gold as second-best rather than ideal, warns that Britain's restoration at prewar parity ignored the gap with purchasing-power parity, and rejects the Keynes-Hawtrey claim that the trade cycle is a monetary disease curable by price stabilization. Credit creation, banks making means of payment that did not previously exist, is capitalism's mechanism for financing innovation. Managed credit, he concludes, would turn money into economic governance and quietly prepare the way for socialism.

Und von diesem Standpunkt versteht man dann diese ganze Gedankenrichtung und besonders den Keynesplan als sehr ernstzunehmende Vorarbeit für einen ernstzunehmenden Sozialismus.

English translation: “And from this standpoint one then understands this entire line of thought, and especially the Keynes plan, as very serious preparatory work for a serious socialism.”

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.