HALLESISM. - The Genoese merchant Agostino Maria Trucco (1865-1940) called Hallesint (from Halles = food markets, and int = international) a project of his for a consortium for exchanges: hence the name of H., attributed by popular usage to the doctrine and to the cultural and practical movement (an Italian school of economics) that followed from it, with the aim of making applied economics a positive science, capable of autonomous solutions to the problems proper to it.
The laws of this science are principally the contractual unifications arising from usage or anticipated by intelligence, which historically have always marked economic progress in exchanges, in the safeguarding of savings, and in the circulation of currencies and symbols. The solution of present-day social questions must therefore be sought along the path of a further perfecting and unification of these contracts: they are, in reality, solely moral and economic questions, to be resolved respectively by moral means and by economic means.
The latter are to be recognized not in the expedients of economic policy to which governments are driven (price controls, administered prices, tariffs, dumping, controls, stockpiles, subsidies, etc.), but rather in innovations of contractual technique capable of arousing, facilitating and guaranteeing the formation of savings, the rational distribution of capital and the opening of commercial outlets, by which alone the right to work and the just price, that is, social justice, are realized.
Such innovations spring principally from the recognition that the three kinds of goods among which exchange takes place, namely past, present and future goods, do not present, as is indispensable, an equal degree of marketability. In fact the symbols of future goods offered by the enterprise do not find, because of the risks that accompany them (of investment, of immobilization and of devaluation), especially among distant geographical regions, a placement proportional to the respective capacities for saving and for productive increase. Hence the laborious and disorderly formation of new capital and, above all, the reduction of consumption, which make the expedients of economic policies necessary.
The practical proposals, already surfacing in more than one attempt at world economic organization, take concrete form in the unification of the contract of exchange, to be realized, in a first phase, in the credit and monetary field, through the work of an intermediary-contracting body with the juridical character of a universal foundation, operating through the banking institutions already in existence, with a very high degree of automaticity, on the model of the universal postal union. To make use of its services will be free and voluntary.
Such a foundation will issue, by virtue of a special convention stipulated with individual governments (whose representatives would constitute the general council), two standard securities: one of investment (interest-bearing certificates); the other of payment (non-interest-bearing checks), both unlimitedly sellable and redeemable. With the sale of the certificates the checks will be extinguished, while with the monetary equivalent of these, public and industrial securities will be purchased (for patrimonial purposes and not for resale, unlike the interest-bearing ones) and bank deposits will be made to cover the circulation of the certificates, transforming the raw income of investments into refined income, that is, free from risk.
The system, characterized by a decentralized and automatic functioning and by specific provisions suited to regulating in every place and time the velocity of monetary circulation, frees price fluctuations from arbitrary interference, eliminating the fundamental causes of class struggle and of economic restrictionism, respectively constituted by monetary devaluation and by the differing level of the real prices of labor in the various countries.
Monetary and economic disorder has so gravely compromised public and private morality that a spiritual rebirth now appears closely bound to a rational ordering of credit and of exchanges. To place the savings of all at the disposal of all good wills to work is perhaps, today, the most enlightened and urgent act of justice and social charity.
Bibliography12 works
Mario Baronci