ACCOUNTING FOR INFLATION: HENRY SWEENEY AND THE GERMAN GOLD-MARK MODEL

In his book Stabilized Accounting of 1936, Henry Sweeney differentiated his indexation model for accounting for inflation from the French and German inflation-accounting models of the 1920s by describing the European methods as "usually quite content to stabilize the paper-money book figures on the basis of merely some gold money." Sweeney's composite characterization of the European thought, however, generalizes broadly and proves technically inexact when applied to the Germans. This study offers an account of the German gold-mark model of accounting for inflation as contained in the works of Walter Mahlberg and Eugen Schmalenbach.