Italy’s Public Debt, Finance, and Macro-Usury. A Reckoning: Crimes against Humanity?

Author(s)

Fabrizio Pezzani ,

Download Full PDF Pages: 01-10 | Views: 137 | Downloads: 55 | DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10277044

Volume 12 - November 2023 (11)

Abstract

The dynamics of Italy’s public debt can be attributed to two factors related to the increased use of current and non-current investment expenditure by politicians in search of short-term consensus, and the frequent use of destabilizing actions related to operations outside debt linked to the malicious use of finance, as demonstrated by the trials initiated by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2015.
Until the mid-1970s, public debt was on a virtuous trajectory, fluctuating between 32 and 35% of GDP, a ratio that allows for comparison regardless of changes in the value of currency.
Its relative stability was shaken in that decade and increasingly so in the following one. The graphs indicate a surge in debt not due to internal phenomena but to external action arbitrarily imposed by the introduction of the dollar as the sole currency of exchange in international transactions. In 1945 at Bretton Woods, the conditions had been established that made monetary stability possible by linking the printing of paper money to an underlying real value, gold. The reference currency to which other currencies were to be linked was the dollar, which could be printed at a rate of $36 per ounce of gold. Until 1971, monetary stability fostered unprecedented economic development, but from the mid-1960s in the United States, the Vietnam War began to absorb a growing demand for monetary resources, and the student protests undermined the country's internal equilibrium.

Keywords

Public Debt, Finance, Macro-Usury

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