La moneta di ghiaccio. Il ruolo delle monete complementari: misura anticiclica o strumento di rifondazione del processo di circolazione – il caso delle BCC in Bergamasca

The research deepens the nature and functions of money in a monetary production economy by addressing monetary issues held to be of minor importance by the contemporary mainstream. After defining the functions institutionally attributed to money, the research analyzes the theoretical contributions of Proudhon, Gesell and Keynes in order to emphasize how, according to these authors, money plays an essential role for the explanation of the instability of the economic system in which we actually live. The projects for the re-foundation of money thus developed by Proudhon, Gesell and Keynes are all characterized by the necessity of reserving to money the sole function of means of payment and exchange. To this end, money should be transformed into ‘ice money’, that is, a kind of money that, like goods, is subject to a process of temporal deterioration affecting its nominal value through demurrage, so as to prevent its hoarding. The transformation of money into ‘ice money’ represents the necessary, although not sufficient, condition to trigger a virtuous dynamic process towards full employment, while favoring the downsizing of capital income up to its progressive elimination. Inspired by these projects for the re-foundation of money, the experiences of Banca WIR and SARDEX.net analyzed in this work are characterized by the realization of multilateral clearing houses for commercial credits allowing to apply to local realities the plans originally conceived by the authors mentioned above to re-build the national and international process of circulation of goods and capitals. The ultimate goal of the research was to verify the efficacy of such multilateral clearing houses with respect to the urgencies currently expressed by cooperative credit banks in terms of the recovery of their profitability, which was compromised by the deterioration of credits, and in terms of the reaffirmation of their mutualistic purpose with regard to the local economic reality as a fundamental distinctive character compared to commercial banks. The research also contains a specific study devoted to the economic reality of the province of Bergamo, in which the phenomenon of cooperative credit banking has its roots. Within this context, and with the third sector acting as a flywheel, the multilateral clearing house for commercial credits is able to express its full potential not only as an anti-cyclical tool benefitting the local economy, but also as a more ambitious structural re-foundation tool of the process of circulation of the real economic system.