HALLESISMO. — The Genoese merchant Agostino Maria Trucco (1865–1940) coined the term Hallesint (from Halles = food markets, and int = international) to describe his project for a consortium for trade exchanges; hence the name h., which public opinion applied to the doctrine and cultural and practical movement (an Italian economic school) that followed, aimed at making applied economics a positive science capable of autonomous solutions to its own problems.
The laws of this science are primarily the contractual unifications arising from custom or anticipated by foresight, which have historically always marked economic progress in trade, in the safeguarding of savings, and in the circulation of money and its symbols. The solution to present social questions must therefore be sought along the path of further perfecting and unifying these contracts: in reality, these questions are purely moral and economic ones, to be resolved respectively by moral and economic means.
The latter are not to be found in the expedients of economic policy to which governments are driven (price controls, political prices, tariffs, dumping, controls, subsidies, premiums, etc.), but rather in innovations in contractual technique capable of fostering, facilitating, and guaranteeing the formation of savings, the rational destruction of capital, and the opening of markets—through which alone the right to work and a just price, i.e., social justice, are realized.
Such innovations stem mainly from the recognition that the three kinds of goods involved in exchange—past, present, and future goods—do not, as is essential, possess an equal degree of marketability. Indeed, the symbols of future goods offered by enterprise do not, because of the risks that accompany them (investment risk, immobilization, and devaluation), find placement proportional to the respective capacities for saving and productive growth, especially across distant geographical regions. Hence the laborious and disorderly formation of new capital and, above all, the reduction of consumption, which makes necessary the expedients of economic policy.
Practical proposals, already emerging in more than one attempt at world economic organization, converge on the unification of the exchange contract, to be achieved in a first phase in the credit and monetary sphere through the action of an intermediary-contracting foundation with the legal character of a universal institution, operating through existing banking institutions with a very high degree of automaticity, on the model of the Universal Postal Union. Use of its services would be free and voluntary.
This foundation would issue, by virtue of a special convention stipulated with individual governments (whose representatives would constitute the general council), two standard securities: one for investment (interest-bearing bonds) and one for payment (non-interest-bearing checks), both of which would be freely negotiable and redeemable. The sale of bonds would extinguish the checks, while the monetary equivalent of these checks would be used to purchase public and industrial securities (for patrimonial purposes and not for resale, unlike trusts) and to make bank deposits to cover the circulation of bonds, transforming the gross income of investments into refined income, i.e., free from risk.
The system, characterized by decentralized and automatic operation and by specific provisions designed to regulate the velocity of monetary circulation in every place and time, frees price fluctuations from arbitrary interference, eliminating the fundamental causes of class struggle and economic constraint—namely, monetary devaluation and the varying real prices of labor in different countries.
Since monetary and economic disorder has gravely compromised public and private morality, a spiritual rebirth now appears closely bound to a rational ordering of credit and exchange. Placing the savings of all at the disposal of all goodwill in labor may well be, today, the most enlightened and urgent act of social justice and charity.