The Great War imposed an unprecedented economic effort on Italy and called for a radical change in the allocation of resources. The Bank of Italy faced the difficult task of supporting the delicate monetary balances of the emergency and, at the same time, provided itself with the tools to guarantee the functionality of the banking system and to facilitate the absorption of the growing public debt.
The Introduction of Gianni Toniolo and the numerous documents collected in this volume reconstruct emblematic episodes of the economic life of wartime, such as the moratorium of 1914 and the establishment of the monopoly on exchange rate, and show the picture of the Bank of Italy's daily reports with the Treasury, the banks, the big industry.
A technical and normative appendix, the chronology of the period in examination and the biographies of the relevant characters complete the volume.
