Guido Carli’s moral values and writings: a compass in a changed world

‘Unless we move towards the creation of institutions and structures suited to the global scale of the problems, we will inevitably slide back into arbitrariness and the divisions of nationalism.’ So argued Guido Carli in 1971. His words were prophetic not only in the tenacity with which, in the post-war period, he conceived and realised the dream of an Italia as an ‘open society’, fully integrated into the international economy thanks to its adherence to the Bretton Woods agreements, and of a unified Europe extending beyond the monetary sphere, but also in his vision of an interconnected world in which oxymorons could dissolve and coexist without contradiction: state and market, stability and efficiency, national interest and supranational interest.

The call to prepare oneself to learn how to manage global issues appears as an epigraph to the introductory chapter of the book *For Monetary Stability and the Market* – a chapter written by the economic historian Giovanni Farese – which brings together 26 articles by Carli written between 1960 and 1975, when he was Governor of the Bank of Italia, and published in the journal “Bancaria”. The volume – published by Laterza, sponsored by the Italian Banking Association (ABI) and the Luigi Einaudi Institute for Banking, Financial and Insurance Studies, and edited by Federico Pascucci – was presented yesterday at LUISS, of which Carli was one of the founders. He was convinced, as Rector Paolo Boccardelli recalled, that ‘the university should open its doors to civil society and train the future ruling class’.

“This book provides intellectual and economic insights far more significant than we could have imagined when we decided to publish it,” said the president of the ABI, Antonio Patuelli, alluding to the consequences of the crisis in Iran and the Gulf and referring to the statesman’s words spoken before the 1973 oil crisis. The Governor’s responses to the shocks, Patuelli emphasised, were always ‘more than just monetary measures’. Even today, ‘the fight against inflation – a seven-headed Hydra – must not be delegated exclusively to the wisdom and autonomy of central banks. To combat it, we need action from the European Union. Carli’s work in Maastricht inspires us to urge the EU to generate a new impetus, like that of the first National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).’

Paolo Savona, former chairman of Consob, who worked with Carli at both the Bank of Italy and Confindustria (2026 will mark the 50th anniversary of Carli’s presidency at Viale dell’Astronomia), put it quite clearly: ‘If central banks were to consider raising interest rates at this moment, they would cause more damage than is necessary. Cost-push inflation cannot be remedied by tight monetary policies.’ Whilst Savona highlighted Carli’s courage and ability to adapt to reality as his key qualities, the legal scholar Sabino Cassese, professor emeritus at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, outlined the ‘new diplomacy’ pioneered by the Governor: not merely a ‘monetary diplomat’, but a forerunner of the multilateral negotiations that become necessary when ‘one must take into account not two interests, but many’. Once again, he was prescient.

It was Governor Emeritus Ignazio Visco who, in the face of the ‘extraordinary imbalances’ we are currently experiencing, highlighted the need for ‘a new Bretton Woods’ – the very system whose rise and subsequent decline Carli had foreseen: a system in which ‘we seek to revive the idea that symmetry and a shared purpose are necessary’. In the meantime, however, he believes that a rise in interest rates cannot be ruled out as a tool to counter not the supply shock itself, but the ‘second-round effects’ – the consequences of firms adjusting their prices in response to rising costs. Certainly, the link between the economy and security was very clear to Carli, as noted by Marta Dassù, senior advisor for European Affairs at the Aspen Institute. ‘When Carli and the German Governor Karl Blessing decided not to demand the convertibility of their balance-of-payments assets into gold, because it would have undermined the stability of the Bretton Woods system, they chose a course of action that made little sense for the two European countries but signalled just how much Italia and Germany took their dependence on the US into account, and how clearly they understood that it was in both their interests to keep the United States anchored to Europe.”