ABSTRACT
During the civil war period engineering factories had been living on reserves of pig-iron, and by the middle of 1920 these had dwindled to half a million poods. The fuel crisis which grew particularly acute in the early months of 1921 accordingly threatened a paralysis of industry; and a solution of it was a crucial preliminary to economic recovery. By the autumn of 1922 the economic position had sufficiently improved for the textile industry, whose production had been drastically restricted in 1921, to show a marked leap forward. In analysing the problem of the movement in the general price level two main tendencies of interpretation appeared. The first, represented principally by Professor Falkner, assigned chief importance to monetary factors as causes of the price phenomena of 1923, and the second placed emphasis on changes in the goods turnover. Monetary factors were certainly the main part of the explanation of the rapid rise of general prices in 1923.
