HALLESISMO. — 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 h., attributed by common usage to the doctrine and the cultural and practical movement (the Italian economic school) that arose from it, with the aim of making applied economics a positive science, capable of autonomous solutions to the problems proper to II.
The laws of this science are principally the contractual unifications arising from custom or anticipated by intelligence, which historically have always marked economic progress in exchanges, in the insurance of savings, and in the circulation of currencies and symbols. The solution to present-day social questions must therefore be found in the further refinement and unification of these contracts: in reality, they are solely moral and economic questions, to be resolved respectively by moral and economic means.
The latter are not to be identified with the expedients of economic policy to which governments are driven (price controls, administered prices, tariffs, dumping, controls, stockpiling, subsidies, etc.), but rather with innovations in contractual technique capable of bringing about, facilitating, and guaranteeing the formation of savings, the rational distribution of capital, and the opening of commercial outlets, through which alone the right to work and the fair price—that is, social justice—can be realized.
Such innovations arise principally from the recognition that the three kinds of goods among which exchange takes place—namely, past, present, and future goods—do not possess, as is indispensable, an equal degree of marketability. Indeed, the symbols of future goods offered by enterprise do not find, because of the risks accompanying them (investment, immobilization, and devaluation), especially between distant geographical regions, placement proportional to their respective capacities for saving and productive growth. 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 emerging in more than one attempt at worldwide economic organization, take concrete form in the unification of the exchange contract, to be achieved, in a first phase, in the field of credit and currency, through an intermediary-contracting body with the legal character of a universal foundation, acting through the banking institutions already in existence, with an extremely high degree of automaticity, on the model of the Universal Postal Union. Use of its services will be free and voluntary.
This foundation will issue, by virtue of a special convention concluded with the individual governments (whose representatives would constitute the general council), two standard securities: one for investment (interest-bearing certificates); the other for payment (non-interest-bearing checks), both freely saleable and redeemable without limit. The sale of the certificates will extinguish the checks, while with the monetary equivalent of the latter, public and industrial securities will be purchased (for asset-holding purposes and not for resale, unlike the fruttifere) and bank deposits will be made to cover the circulation of the certificates, transforming the gross income from investments into refined income, that is, income free of risk.
The system, characterized by decentralized and automatic operation and by specific measures capable of regulating the speed of monetary circulation everywhere and at all times, frees price fluctuations from arbitrary interference, eliminating the fundamental causes of class struggle and economic restrictionism, respectively constituted by monetary devaluation and by the different levels of real prices for labor in the various countries.
Monetary and economic disorder has so gravely compromised public and private morality that spiritual rebirth now appears closely connected with a rational organization of credit and exchange. Making everyone’s savings available to all persons of good will who are prepared to work is perhaps today the most enlightened and urgent act of social justice and charity.