3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
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.”
When does scholarly caution become a failure of public responsibility? In this first report, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary confronts economists’ delayed opposition to German inflation. His criticism joins a defence of monetary theory to a concrete account of what depreciation concealed: firms could accumulate materials while uncertainty prevented long-term investment. Apparent enrichment, he argues, could coexist with the destruction of productive opportunities. Stabilization, meanwhile, remained vulnerable to reparations arrangements that might undermine central-bank restraint. The report offers a pointed encounter between economic diagnosis and professional obligation: Somary demands further empirical research but refuses to make complete evidence a prerequisite for warning against destructive policy.
Was inflationary finance a necessity of state survival, or a policy whose alternatives went unused? In this brief closing intervention at the 1924 meeting, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary presses the second view. His replies to fellow economists turn disputes over monetary theory into questions of fiscal and central-bank responsibility. He recalls demands for a capital levy during the war and argues that stronger postwar taxation could have displaced reliance on the printing press. His objection to raising the discount rate from 7 to 8 percent—when he suggests perhaps 30 percent was needed—makes the scale of his criticism concrete. The exchange shows precisely where Somary locates avoidable failure, while acknowledging the possible necessity of emergency money creation immediately after the war.
Capital can return after a war without restoring the institutions that once coordinated its movement. In this lecture, delivered in 1928 and published in 1929, Felix Somary approaches that discrepancy as both economist and banker, concerned with decisions that cannot wait for historical hindsight. His distinctive focus is the shift from British commercial finance to American securities speculation: optimistic share valuations can give expanding firms exceptionally cheap capital, even as they expose investors to disappointed expectations. Financial recovery, he argues, also leaves foreign property vulnerable to nationalism and weak legal enforcement. The lecture offers a concrete way to distinguish abundant funds from an effective financial order—and to see how the same investment mechanisms can finance industrial experimentation while widening divisions between secure creditor economies and insecure destinations.
Why would investors accept tiny yields on shares while farmers struggled to borrow even at seven or eight percent? In this closing contribution to a scholarly debate, originally published in 1929, Felix Somary insists that the puzzle concerns the allocation of capital, not simply its scarcity. His example is Sofina, whose high share price dwarfed its dividend; the relevant yield, he reminds an interlocutor, must be calculated against market price rather than nominal value. Alongside his defence of a German debt-consolidation loan, Somary advances a tentative social explanation: income has shifted from older rentiers towards younger speculators. The exchanges expose a precise disagreement over what investors seek from securities—and why settling international debts might not resolve the distortions in long-term lending.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”