In the end perhaps we need to give up and admit that "money is an enigma: we use it all our lives but deep down we don't know why". Professor Maurizio Ferraris, author with his American colleague John Rogers Searle of the book "Money and its deceptions" (Einaudi, euro 12), concludes the philosophical journey to discover the profound meaning of money in front of the packed Auditorium of the Intesa Sanpaolo skyscraper, and induces further doubts about the social relationship with this instrument which appears to us in the history of humanity as a source of wealth and well-being, of division and injustice, of wars and even of progress.
The comparison – with the president of Intesa Sanpaolo, Gian Maria Gros-Pietro, the secretary general of the Compagnia di San Paolo, Piero Gastaldo, and the deputy director of the press, Luca Ubaldeschi – it was an opportunity to raise questions and offer answers, indications, ways to define money and its main functions, sometimes contradictory in its real manifestations. Certainly money "functions as status" and is "the great metaphor of life in society" argues the Turin professor, but neither economic and social analysis, nor thought are enough to fully explain its nature, its changes and its function in a world that today, through digital technologies, woos us with the ambiguous charm of bitcoin and the currency that exists but cannot be seen. Recently Pope francesco, faced with the deviations and abuses of the contemporary economy, he recalled the warning of Francis of Assisi – "money is the devil's dung" – to argue that "when money becomes an idol, when it commands man's choices then it ruins man and condemns him". Yet there is also a symmetry between money and God. For Ferraris “we have vague and mistaken ideas about God and money: both would not exist without books, without documents and without memory. A society without marriages, without promises, would be a weak society, just as a God, whom humanity forgets, would not have a great future”.
Money is the document of history, of our evolution and of our social relationship. But it cannot work alone, it must be disciplined. This is where banks enter the field to collect and govern savings for investment. “Uninvested savings are blood withdrawn from circulation and from the healthy development of the economic system” declares Gros-Pietro, "the role of the bank is to regulate the right amount of money in circulation, the creation of money must be controlled because if it is too much it creates inflation, if it drops much it produces unemployment".
Money, therefore, can have a social function if governed by responsibility. And here it's up to Piero Gastaldo who with the Compagnia di San Paolo, the first shareholder of Intesa Sanpaolo, is "at the end of the path": he collects the bank's dividends and distributes them through philanthropic projects to those in need, pursuing collective objectives, public bodies that sometimes produce a social dividend, but not an economic profit. "We repair the wounds of society, reshape social relationships and strengthen the reasons for cohesion" thus praising what was once called the "gift" economy. Operating on the very concrete needs of people's lives, Gastaldo is certainly not fascinated by the world of bitcoin because at the basis of everything "there must be faith or trust, what bitcoin lacks to become a new form of money is fides, not documentability. Through money we exchange articles of faith, it is no coincidence that the apostle Luke was a money changer”.
Even the president of Intesa Sanpaolo warns: “The blockchain behind bitcoin is a fantastic document system, but handling these huge amounts of information and data are very few people who probably know each other. A dangerous imbalance of power is created.”. Gros-Pietro has no doubts about bitcoin: "It is not a currency, but an asset not very different from the lottery ticket the day before the extraction".
In conclusion, the moderator Ubaldeschi asked the speakers to choose "the color of money", the title of a famous American film. For Ferraris it is "green", that of dollars and cinema. For Gros-Pietro it is “gold” because it is the object closest to money: divisible, convertible, available in limited quantities. Gastaldo, on the other hand, chooses the color "red", because money "must promote good blood circulation in the economic system", with a final caveat: "however it could be transparent, therefore evanescent". Just as befits an enigma or an illusion.
