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takes its rise. Who in 1912 had heard of forced saving, of disparities between the equilibrium and the money rates of interest and of the cycle of fluctuations in the relations between the prices of producers' goods and consumers' goods which is the result of the instability of credit? They are all here, not as obiter dicta on what are essentially side issues, as is occasionally the case in the earlier literature, but as central parts of a fully articulated theoretical system—a system which the author has had the somewhat melancholy satisfaction of seeing abundantly verified by the march of subsequent events, first in the great inflations of the immediately post-war period and later in the events which gave rise to the depression from which the world is now suffering. Nor should we overlook its contributions to the more abstract parts of the theory of the value of money. Professor von Mises shares with Marshall and one or two others the merit of having assimilated the treatment of this theory to the general categories of the pure theory of value: and his emphasis in the course of this assimilation on the relation between uncertainty and the size of the cash holding and the dependence of certain monetary phenomena on the absence of foresight, anticipates much that has proved most fruitful in more recent speculation in these matters. In spite of a tendency observable in some quarters to revert to more mechanical forms of the Quantity Theory, in particular to proceed by way of a multiplication of purely tautological formulae, it seems fairly clear that further progress in the explanation of the more elusive monetary phenomena is likely to take place along this path.

The present translation is based upon the text of the second German edition, published in 1924. Certain passages of no great interest to English readers have been omitted and a chapter dealing with more or less purely German controversies has been placed in an appendix. The comments on policy, however, in Part III, chapter vi, have been left as they appeared in 1924. [1] But the author, who has most generously lent assistance at every stage of the translation, has written a special introduction in which he outlines his views on the problems which have emerged since that date. A note in the appendix gives the German equivalents to the technical terms which have been employed to designate the different kinds of money, and discusses in detail the translation of one term for which no exact English equivalent existed.

Lionel Robbins

London School of Economics

September 1934

[1]Except for one minor change of tense. In the second edition, the author prefaced the first major division of the last chapter of Part III with a note to the effect that this section was to be read as referring to the time about 1912, when it was originally written. In the present edition, in order to prevent certain misunderstandings that seemed possible even if this note had been reprinted in its proper place on p. 368, certain practices and circumstances (especially in sections 4 to 8) have been described in the past tense.

Preface to the English Edition

The outward guise assumed by the questions with which banking and currency policy is concerned changes from month to month and from year to year. Amid this flux, the theoretical apparatus which enables us to deal with these questions remains unaltered. In fact, the value of economics lies in its enabling us to recognize the true significance of problems, divested of their accidental trimmings. No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.

Ten years have elapsed since the second German edition of the present book was published. During this period the external appearance of the currency and banking problems of the world has completely altered. But closer examination reveals that the same