VII - The Bank of Italy and the Banking System 1919-1936edited by Giuseppe Guarino and Gianni Toniolo

The 1920s and 1930s were the years of economic instability: the tumultuous and sometimes dramatic events of large industrial and banking companies, which had important political implications, added to the crisis of post-war reconversion and to the subsequent Great Depression. At that time the foundations of the credit system, which arrives mostly unchanged until very recently, were laid. From the documents and from the introductory essays included in this volume new elements emerge on the relations between the Central Bank and the political authority, on the banking crises of the 1920s, on the monetary effects of the great crisis, and on the history of banking legislation. The outcome is a deepening of the interactions between the economic events of those years and the legal developments.