ABSTRACT
While a number of expansionists claim to be able to create prosperity by increasing the volume of credit available to production, another group of the same school sees the salvation of mankind in the expansion of consumers’ purchasing power. Even though members of the two groups of expansionists overlap, the difference between the two reforms is sufficiently marked to justify us in regarding them as being distinct from each other and to a large extent even opposed to each other. Needless to say, those advocating expansion of purchasing power constitute by far the more radical school, both from a financial and from a political point of view. The credit expansion school includes many industrialists and landowners who are politically conservative and who are, generally speaking, in favour of a conservative budgetary policy. Those in favour of expansion of purchasing power, on the other hand, are for the most part Socialists, even though many of them would not be described or describe themselves as such. They believe in the creation of purchasing power by the State, if necessary at the cost of an unbalanced budget and monetary inflation.
