Donato Menichella was the General Director of IRI (Institute for Industrial Reconstruction) from its foundation until the Second World War and had a leading role in the making of the 1936 banking law. In the post-war period he was Governor of the Bank of Italy from 1947 to 1960.
In Menichella's view, monetary stability was the premise for economic development and the success of trade liberalization policies. In the 1950s the Italian economic results were among the best in Europe, both in terms of monetary stability and economic growth. The restoration of the convertibility of the lira in the end of the decade crowned this policy.
In the banking sector, Menichella managed the implementation of the reform decided in the mid-1930s. The pillars of its policies, oriented towards financial stability, were the separation of banking and the industrial sectors, the maintenance of a multiplicity of independent centers of credit supply, and the safeguard of the of local banks role.
The book collects Menichella's letters, his ascribed notes, speeches, and minutes from which he emerges as the central banker of the reconstruction and economic boom; the exchange of views is behind the key choices in economic policy. The documents, mostly unpublished, are taken from the Bank of Italy's archives and from several other sources. The «Concluding Remarks» of Bank of Italy's Annual Reports are collected in a separate volume. They constitute a consistent expression of Menichella's thought and a unique source of documentation on Italian economic history and postwar economic policy.
