L’Europa tra l’ordoliberalismo tedesco, Hayek, Schumpeter e Keynes. L’attualità degli anni ’30 nel dibattito contemporaneo su moneta, credito, crisi e austerità.

The research starts from the interpretation of the causes of the debt crisis in the Eurozone formulated by the more rigidly orthodox German economic and political circles, in order to highlight the actuality and importance of elements of theory and economic policy elaborated in the interwar period, both before and after the publication of Keynes’s General Theory. With regard to economic policy, the research shows that, despite the common adhesion to the theoretical model that emerged following the monetarist counter-revolution of the 1970s, compared to the more pragmatic policies adopted In the United States, after 2009 the rigidity of the European response to the crisis originated by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market is explained by a specific paradigm reflecting a neoliberal conception of the role of the State in economics developed in Germany between the late 1920s and early 1930s. This conception has laid the foundations of the social market economy, the formula that has marked the almost twenty-year period (1949-1966) of the German economic miracle. Today, it represents the basis of the economic constitution derived from the ordoliberal principles defined by the norms of the European treaties. The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States represents the first truly global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it did not lead to question the validity of the principle of the neutrality of money and finance. In fact, the interpretations developed by contemporary mainstream economists and by Austrian heterodox economists attribute the origins of the Great Recession and of the debt crisis in the Eurozone to exogenous causes, that is, to errors or omissions of public authorities that have distorted the functioning of the international capital markets. Starting from the fundamental importance ascribed by Schumpeter to the role played by bank money in capitalist economies, with regard to economic theory, the research is therefore directed to the development of an alternative paradigm to that based on Say’s Law and on the irrelevance and instability of the monetary economy of production described by Keynes, an economy in which economic crisis can be produced endogenously by both “enterprise” and “speculation”.