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The invasion of Ukraine will change the economic and political scenarios. Together with the sanctions, it will accelerate the 'de-globalization' process already triggered by the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. In this paper, we analyze the effects that economic sanctions will have, in particular, on the international monetary system. In recent years, the dominance of the dollar as the default international currency has weakened albeit slowly. However, in the new scenario, alternative systems to SWIFT (particularly the Chinese one) will receive a strong boost as will the use of payments in currencies other than the dollar. As has already happened in other historical periods, the change in the dominant international currency is linked to epochal events and to a change in the technological paradigm: the war and the development of a digital currency in China and then in other countries could form the basis of this turning point. ; L'invasione dell'Ucraina cambierà profondamente gli scenari economici e politici. Assieme alle sanzioni, accelererà il processo di 'de-globalizzazione' innescato dalla crisi finanziaria del 2008 e dalla pandemia. In questo lavoro analizziamo gli effetti che le sanzioni avranno su questi processi, in particolare sul sistema monetario internazionale. Negli ultimi anni il dominio del dollaro come valuta dei pagamenti internazionali è declinato ma lentamente, e i tentativi soprattutto della Cina e della Russia di emarginarlo non hanno avuto grande successo. Tuttavia, nel nuovo scenario i sistemi alternativi a SWIFT, particolarmente quello cinese, riceveranno un forte impulso così come l'utilizzo di pagamenti in valute diverse dal dollaro. Come già successo in altre epoche storiche, il cambiamento della valuta di riferimento degli scambi internazionali è legato a eventi epocali e a un cambio di paradigma tecnologico: la guerra e la valuta digitale cinese e poi di altri paesi potrebbero costituire le basi di questa svolta.

The 2008 crisis created a need to rethink many aspects of economic theory, including the role of public intervention in the economy. On this issue, we explore the Barro-Ricardo equivalence, which has played a decisive role in molding the economic policies that fostered the crisis. We analyze the equivalence and its theoretical underpinnings, concluding that: (1) it declares, but then forgets, that it does not matter whether the nature of debt and investment is public or private; (2) its most problematic assumption is the representative agent hypothesis, which does not allow for an explanation of financialization and cannot assess dangers coming from high levels of financial leverage; (3) social wealth cannot be based on any micro-foundation and is linked to the role of the state as provider of financial stability; and (4) default is always the optimal policy for the government, and this remains true even when relaxing many equivalence assumptions. We go on to discuss possible solutions to high levels of public debt in the real world, inferring that no general conclusions are possible and every solution or mix of solutions must be tailored to each specific case. We conclude by connecting different solutions to the political balance of forces in the current era of financialization, using Italy (and, by extension, the eurozone) as a concrete example to better illustrate the discussion.

Since the 2008 crisis, the economics literature has shown a renewed interest in Keynes's "beauty contest" (BC) as a fundamental aspect of the functioning of financial markets. We argue that to understand the importance of the BC, psychological and informational factors are of small importance, and a dynamic-structural approach should be followed instead: the BC framework is paramount because it is rooted in the historical trajectory of capitalism and it is not simply a consequence of "irrational" (i.e., biased) agents. In this genuine form, the BC mechanism allows one to understand the main trends of a financialized world. Moreover, the conventional nature of financial markets provides a sound method for assessing different economic policies whose effectiveness depends on how much they can influence the convention itself. This alternative understanding of the BC can be used to start the needed rethinking of economics, urged by the crisis, that is for now reduced to studying the financial and psychological "imperfections" of the market.