An analysis of the nature and changing role of money: history and perspectives

Can we create diverse economies? This question raises after having studied and analysed the history of economy, with a particular focus on the difficulties of the most recent years. Let us think, for instance, to the 2007-2009 Great Financial Crisis, a subprime mortgage crisis, born in the United States of America, and rapidly spread in the financial systems of the entire world. Another example can be the 2011 sovereign debt crisis which started in Cyprus and Greece, but also hit “stronger” countries like Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal. The Covid-19 pandemic caused a demand shock with an extremely negative effect on the economies of the whole world during the last years. Last, but not least, the energetic emergency created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the relative sanctions against the aggressor. It is easy to see how last decades were characterised by a general condition of uncertainty that helped to mine the basis of the mainstream economy.Therefore, the questions raise about the challenges of scaling up diverse economies into a meaningful alternative to the limits of the dominant view of the economy. This work aims to show, from a monetary perspective and exploiting what the history has taught us, possible, unconventional tools that could be future, successful solutions for the economic growth. The first chapter discusses the topic of the money: its function, its role, and its distinctive characteristics with a focus on its evolution through the history. The secondchapter examines the ‘imaginary money’. Luigi Einaudi, thanks to his very interesting study conducted on the subject, went through the process of development of this particular currency, from its birth, during the Charlemagne era, until the French revolution. The third chapter explores the nearly unknown field of the complementary currencies as a way to solve a lot of problems of nowadays societies. It also provides several examples of parallel currencies underlying their fundamental role in local communities. Finally, in the last chapter there is a specific focus on the MEFO Bills, a form of complementary currency introduced, just before the Second World War, by the German minister of economy Hjalmar Schacht to foster the rearmament of the Nazi Germany. This work can boast a wide range of sources that goes from the most authoritative authors (Shumpeter, Menger, Einaudi), to recent development in the field of economics, passing through important studies conducted by the greatest institutions and the textbooks of subjects like Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, History of Economics Thought and Geography Economics.