1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.”
Somary, lecturing at Heidelberg in the war's long aftermath, argues that 1918 recast not merely currencies and trade routes but the very axes of economic politics: state construction, market scale, and world-power position now cut across the old party labels. Liberalism and socialism, once international programs, have both curdled into national interest parties. From this his German survey moves through spaces rather than doctrines, a Britain sunk from ingenious solver to land of unsolved problems, a United States crossing from colonial periphery to world power as the Federal Reserve and New York displace London, a Europe fragmented by tariff walls into a caricature of itself. His boldest proposal is a Franco-German economic union marrying French capital to German labor; his sharpest observation, that the great capitalist organizer and the socialist planner converge in their appetite for monopoly and stabilization.
Das Europa von heute ist eine Karikatur dessen, was es sein sollte.
English translation: “The Europe of today is a caricature of what it ought to be.”
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.”
Delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs as the slump deepened, this 1931 address refuses the comfort of ideology: the Depression, Somary insists, spared neither capitalist, syndicalised, nor socialised economies alike. He traces the collapse to gold hoarding and a failing gold-exchange standard, to raw-material prices that cratered while finished goods and wages held firm, and to speculation fed by New York's call-money market. Communism, he argues, is the lesser danger; war is the greater, as distress feeds radical nationalism and the Hitler movement. His remedies—wage reductions, the breaking of cartels, state purchases of cheap raw materials, and a Franco-German confidence rebuilt under British leadership—frame his closing warning that the years ahead may earn the historian's name 'Between Two Wars.'
Europe has no lack of capital; what she needs is confidence.
A prediction come true frames this 1932 pamphlet: the crisis, its author had forecast, would end only after Italian banking reconstruction, the collapse and reorganization of Germany's banks, Britain's suspension of gold, and the fall of the Kreuger concern. With those grim preconditions fulfilled, Somary asks whether the turn has come. He indicts moratoria and the German Stillhalteabkommen as evasions that postpone necessary write-downs, argues that commodity prices have reached a despair point from which raw-material countries will lead recovery, and reads France's vast hoarded gold reserve—explained through the memory of John Law and the assignats—as a latent support. His proposals bind reparations to guaranteed purchases of American wheat, cotton, and copper, cut expenditure to revenue, and rehabilitate currencies by telling the truth and writing down claims.
Mit „Kreditschöpfung“ ist wenig zu erreichen, es fehlt nicht an Kapital noch an Kredit, sondern an guten Schuldnern.
English translation: “Little can be achieved with "credit creation"; what is lacking is neither capital nor credit, but sound debtors.”
Naturally among the poorest countries in Europe, yet per head the richest in capital: from this paradox Somary's ten theses, delivered at the University of Zurich in February 1937, unfold a warning to a small neutral state. Switzerland's fortune, he argues, rests on four centuries of peace and a liberal order that replaced power between states with achievement between individuals—an order now collapsing. The decisive modern conflict, he contends, lies not between liberalism and socialism but between a peace economy and a war economy, in which the sovereign consumer becomes a burden and bureaucratic allocation supplants the market. He tracks the exposure of Swiss creditors to German debts, condemns Britain's 1931 devaluation as a spreading contagion, and grounds the country's last defense in the inviolability of life, liberty, honor, and property.
Auf das dringendste muß gefordert werden, daß die Pandorabüchse der Abwertung endgültig versiegelt und künftig nie anders als bei Kriegsgefahr geöffnet werde.
English translation: “It must be demanded in the most urgent terms that the Pandora's box of devaluation be sealed once and for all, and henceforth never opened except in the event of the danger of war.”
From a Vienna childhood under Carl Menger's tutelage to advisory rooms in wartime Washington, these memoirs follow a banker who cast himself as a forecaster of storms—the 'political meteorologist' of the title. Somary recounts learning marginal utility as it dissolved the labor theory of value, befriending Schumpeter and Otto Bauer, and building at the Anglo-Austrian Bank a career that let him attempt an Anglo-German naval détente before 1914. Independence, he insists, was the price and reward of foresight: his warnings against unrestricted submarine warfare, postwar inflation, the Great Depression, and Hitler repeatedly isolated him from opinion and power. The later chapters carry him through Swiss supply missions to the United States, a skeptical view of Keynes at Bretton Woods, and a lifelong reading of his age as the long aftermath of the French Revolution.
Beide Männer scheiterten in ihrem Vaterland. Jeder der beiden hatte nur im Ausland wirklichen Erfolg, und doch hatten sie eines gemeinsam: Außerhalb ihres Heimatlandes fühlten sie sich wie im Exil.
English translation: “Both men failed in their native country. Each of them enjoyed real success only abroad, and yet they had one thing in common: outside their homeland they felt as if in exile.”
Crusade, Reformation, Revolution: Europe's three great movements of ideas, Somary contends in this 1952 political testament, each produced results opposite to their creators' aims, and each ultimately swelled the power of the state. He denies that peoples are truly sovereign, watches modern war put a uniform on thought, food, and death alike, and charts the replacement of the measured Rechtsstaat by the boundless Machtstaat. State monopoly over money creation, he argues—abetted by Knapp's nominalism—hands governments an instrument of silent expropriation, while Jacobin primacy of politics and the doctrine of national self-determination corrode law and liberty. Against Bolshevism, which he judges to rest on power and nothing else, he sets Switzerland's organic democracy, and codifies his pessimism in twenty 'social laws of inverse proportion' explaining how tyranny thrives beneath the forms of popular sovereignty.
Je stärker die Gewalt konzentriert ist, desto geringer ist die Verantwortung.
English translation: “The more strongly power is concentrated, the smaller is responsibility.”