A world without gold: the debate on the clearing system in Italy during fascism (1935-1943)

Italy was one of the first countries to adopt clearing in the crisis of the 1930s, and an Italian economist, Luigi Luzzatti, is due (in 1907) one of the first theoretical formulations of this form of international trade regulation, defined. Many economists, especially those who were more “organic” to the fascist regime, found in clearing a way to permanently remove from gold that “garment of respectability” of which John Maynard Keynes had spoken. Together with money-labor, clearing thus became one of the main arguments in the rhetorical arsenal which exalted totalitarian economies as a fair and balanced system, as opposed to capitalist economies. But a significant part of the discipline showed decided skepticism for the clearing system, adhering to the liberal tradition. The debate continued after the fall of the regime and the end of the war, with the experience of the European Payments Union being a de facto clearing arrangement on a regional basis. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the Italian debate on clearing in the international context that in the policy choices that were implemented on trade policy