Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles - The Ludwig von Mises ...

362 Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycleseconomic expansion that follows the granting of bank loansunbacked by a previous increase in voluntary saving. In thisway we will be fully able to take typically macroeconomic“pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations.”See William J. Zahka, The Nobel Prize Economics Lectures (Aldershot,U.K.: Avebury, 1992), pp. 19 and 25–28. Writings in Spanish on the Austriantheory of the business cycle are few but can be traced back to thearticle by Mises published in the Revista de Occidente in 1932 (“La causade las crisis económicas,” Revista de Occidente, February 1932) and toLuis Olariaga’s translation of Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, by F.A.Hayek (La teoría monetaria y el ciclo económico [Espasa-Calpe, 1936]). Olariaga’sedition of this book of Hayek’s contains, as an appendix, a translationinto Spanish (entitled “Previsiones de Precios, PerturbacionesMonetarias e Inversiones Fracasadas”) of “Price Expectations, MonetaryDisturbances and Malinvestments” from the original English version.This article appears as chapter 4 of Profits, Interest and Investment andundoubtedly holds one of Hayek’s clearest presentations of his theoryof the business cycle (fortunately it is included in the Spanish translationof Prices and Production published in 1996 [Precios y producción],Unión Editorial, Madrid). The fateful first year of the Spanish Civil Waralso coincided with the publication of the first Spanish translation (byAntonio Riaño) of The Theory of Money and Credit, by Ludwig von Mises(Teoría del dinero y del crédito [Madrid: Editorial Aguilar, 1936]). It is notsurprising that the war reduced the impact of these writings in Spain toa minimum. A notable achievement from the period following the civilwar is Richard von Strigl’s outline of the Austrian theory of the cycle inhis book, Curso medio de economía, M. Sánchez Sarto, Spanish trans.(Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1941). The year 1947 saw thepublication of Teoría de los ciclos económicos (Madrid: CSIC, 1947), byEmilio de Figueroa. In volume 2 of this work Figueroa comparesHayek’s and Keynes’s theories of the cycle (pp. 44–63). The Fondo deCultura Económica also published the translation of J.A. Estey’s book,Business Cycles (Tratado sobre los ciclos económicos [Mexico: Fondo de CulturaEconómica, 1948]), chapter 13 of which contains a detailed explanationof the Austrian theory. The only other works on this subject to betranslated into Spanish are Gottfried Haberler’s book, Prosperity andDepression (Prosperidad y depresión: análisis teórico de los movimientos cíclicos,translated by Gabriel Franco and Javier Márquez and published bythe Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1942; chapter 3 of this book isdevoted to the Austrian School’s theory of circulation credit); F.A.Hayek’s book, The Pure Theory of Capital (La teoría pura del capital, publishedby Aguilar in 1946); and Ludwig von Mises’s work, Human Action(La acción humana: tratado de economía, the first edition of which was publishedin 1960 by the Fundación Ignacio Villalonga). Apart from these