The archive.

A dividend is not the whole of a shareholder’s gain, and a liquidation date does not tell us when losses occurred. These distinctions drive Felix Somary’s 1910 article on measuring the profitability of joint-stock companies. Bringing commercial reasoning to statistical method, he argues that reserves, retained earnings, and the timing of losses must enter calculations that dividend figures alone cannot support. He also separates company profitability from the yield available to someone buying shares at market prices: a high dividend yield may signal a depressed price rather than a flourishing business. The article offers a concrete way to examine how apparently straightforward financial ratios answer different questions—and how poorly chosen accounting categories can distort the record of a business crisis.

A prosperous economy can still lack the cash to withstand a war scare. In this lecture of 5 March 1912, Felix Somary examines how Germany’s industrial expansion and Austrian banks’ growing assets concealed financial vulnerability during the previous summer. His focus is not wealth itself but its availability: German banks financed lasting domestic commitments with short-term foreign funds, while Austrian institutions tied resources up in claims difficult to turn into cash. When foreign creditors declined to renew loans, central reserves bore the strain. Somary’s comparison makes financial preparedness a question of banking practices and fiscal restraint rather than emergency improvisation. It also exposes a tension in wartime finance: gold must meet immediate foreign payments while sustaining the confidence needed to borrow abroad.

Germany’s recurrent money-market strains, Felix Somary argues in this 1912 article, require more than dearer credit: they demand better organization of cash already available. Higher discount rates may punish industries needing working capital rather than those driving a boom, while gold circulating in wages and retail payments cannot simultaneously strengthen Reichsbank reserves. Somary approaches monetary reform through these practical mismatches, connecting bank balances, public treasury operations, and small-denomination notes. Comparisons with England, Austria, and France sharpen his proposals without making foreign institutions ready-made models. The article offers a concrete account of how payment habits and administrative arrangements can create monetary pressure—and why concentrating reserves promises relief while raising its own risks of speculation, dependence, and wartime vulnerability.

A common customs frontier need not imply a common economic state. In this 1915 review of Rudolf Sieghart’s Zolltrennung und Zolleinheit, Felix Somary tests Hungarian demands for tariff separation against the economic conditions that had once justified them. He endorses Sieghart’s historical case against restoring internal barriers, emphasizing Hungarian industry’s development within the union and agriculture’s access to Austrian consumers. His distinctive contribution lies in a question extending beyond that verdict: how much institutional uniformity does customs unity actually require? Common consumption taxes and monopolies coexisted with different direct taxes, railway tariffs, and economic laws—even discriminatory public procurement. This short review distinguishes the case for retaining a customs union from the still-open problem of determining which institutions its members must share.

A bank is not first a lender but an institution whose purpose is to take credit, and from that inversion Somary builds an entire doctrine of banking policy. This revised German edition, expanded from the 1915 original after war and inflation, shifts attention from the asset side of the balance sheet to the liability side, where a bank's size and survival hang on public confidence: banks are servants, not masters, of trust. He rejects theories that make banks autonomous creators of credit and classifies lending by economic liquidity rather than legal form, defining investment credit by whether it exceeds the borrower's liquid assets, at which point it becomes a participation in entrepreneurial risk in the form of credit. Banking crises, he insists, spring less from isolated bad loans than from mismatches among confidence, liquidity, maturity, and institutional form.

Der Industrielle wie der Kaufmann dürfen aus einem Glas trinken, das ihnen nicht gehört; aber es wird ihnen nicht selten gerade in dem Augenblick fortgenommen, in dem sie den stärksten Durst verspüren.

English translation: “The industrialist, like the merchant, may drink from a glass that does not belong to him; but it is not seldom taken from him at the very moment when he feels the strongest thirst.”

Restoring credit in occupied Belgium also meant making German military demands payable. Felix Somary examines this tension from inside the reorganization he helped design: a separate note-issuing department within the Société Générale de Belgique. His 1916 article explains how inaccessible reserves, frozen payments, and proliferating local currencies could paralyse banks whose assets appeared sound. It also defends arrangements that converted requisition claims into spendable francs and financed compulsory contributions through provincial borrowing. Somary’s technical attention to reserve backing and institutional liability sits alongside his justification of occupation policy. Readers can discover how safeguards for noteholders were negotiated against fiscal demands—and how financial reconstruction could serve both everyday exchange and the authority imposing the payments.

Can a wealth levy allow deductions and exemptions without inviting fraud or sacrificing substantial revenue? In this brief intervention in the 1918 proceedings on German financial reorganisation, Felix Somary offers concrete answers: deductible shareholdings should be traceable to approved depositaries on a fixed date, while municipal and charitable wealth should be exempt. His distinction is precise: exempting municipalities need not shield their shareholdings from the indirect effects of a levy on companies. The contribution shows how Somary separates enforceability from the scope of taxation—and why he rejects the 1913 defence contribution as a reliable measure of current revenue potential, without supplying a new calculation.

Strong fiscal powers need not mean state ownership of businesses: that distinction drives Felix Somary’s brief intervention in the 1918 committee discussion on German public finance. Defending a one-time wealth levy, he argues that the threat of state acquisition would induce landowners to declare realistic values, while a first-ranking land charge would spare the Reich an unwieldy collection apparatus. Yet he firmly rejects state participation in individual enterprises, proposing bond financing instead. The interest of this exchange lies in the practical tensions Somary accepts: accurate valuation secured by coercion, public priority at existing creditors’ expense, and immediate tax payment funded by long-term private debt. Readers encounter a sharply defined attempt to separate the state’s power to collect wealth from its power to control businesses.

When should difficulty turning business wealth into cash justify delaying a wealth levy? In this brief intervention in the 1918 committee discussion, Felix Somary treats illiquidity as a specific financial problem rather than a blanket objection to taxation. He proposes secured industrial-bank bonds, citing Austrian practice, but allows payment in installments for businesses such as publishers, small shops, cafés, and restaurants whose assets resist ready capitalization. Even there, earnings-based valuation or a subsequent sale could establish a taxable amount. The interest lies in Somary’s precise boundary between assets that financial institutions can mobilize and those that warrant time to pay: a compact example of how a tax proposal must accommodate the different forms in which business wealth is held.

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.