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.
Inventories that look excessive in a depression may be precisely the reserves a recovery needs. In this 1938 journal article, Ludwig M. Lachmann and F. Snapper challenge the assumption that surplus stocks must disappear before expansion can resume. Drawing on commodity statistics and contrasting cases such as rubber and copper, they argue that industrial raw-material stocks generally accumulate during contraction and shrink during prosperity, buffering rather than simply amplifying fluctuations. Their distinctive emphasis is on who holds the goods, who can finance storage, and how production lags and market expectations affect inventory movements. The article shows why fixed equipment and raw-material reserves cannot be treated as interchangeable forms of investment—and why aggregate stock figures alone cannot explain a crisis.