In the same city where it was decided almost 88 years ago not to obstruct Hitler’s ambitions via the Munich Agreement to occupy the Sudetenland – the orphans of Bretton Woods (1944) tried in recent days laboriously – but in my opinion meritoriously – to establish a new economic and perhaps even monetary world order. The existing system, far from having fallen apart as the Right and the Left are all trying to convince us, still works to the point that the foreign ministers of India, China, the USA and many European nations attended the Munich Security Conference (MSC) to measure themselves with sentences that were less harsh than expected, and to make their contribution to a new international order. Russia was missing, and this was a bad thing.

Usually a new world order is born only as a result of a war, this time there are about 50 pending wars or armed conflicts, with two of these in progress – Ukraine and Gaza – and two potential ones – Iran and Taiwan – keeping politicians around the world in suspense.

MSC 2026 could have benefited from more economists and deeper macroeconomic expertise to complement its geoeconomic panels, which featured impressive voices like Lagarde and Okonjo-Iweala but stayed firmly in the security domain. This is because, in my opinion, the main culprits for these real and potential conflicts are in fact economists and their policies. It is their inability to produce a new vision of the wealth of nations compared to the one prevailing at the time of the Munich meeting in 1938 that incessantly pushes peoples and nations to confront each other in a warlike manner, as well as to destroy the environment and climate in a soon irreversible way.

From Keynes to Guterres

Lord John Maynard Keynes once famously wrote: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead,” in his 1923 book A Tract on Monetary Reform (Chapter 3). The real question is to understand whether “all” referred to the readers present at that moment, or had a broader and unfortunately total horizon: for example the vision of UN Secretary Antonio Guterres, to be clear, which refers to the future of the whole of humanity. 

For Guterres, the total disappearance of the anthropic species is to be attributed to the current way of calculating the wealth of a nation via Gross Domestic Product (GDP). “Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP,” Guterres has said, noting that GDP “tells us the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” These are statements, that without wanting to appear prophetic, I have been saying exactly in those terms for around ten years, and is why I have been promoting in India the replacement of the current GDP standard with that of GDKP – Gross Domestic KNOWLEDGE Product – as my articles in Eurasia Review testify.

But why did I choose India as the first country to pilot the GDKP model? Beyond my attraction to the nation’s undeniable charm, it stemmed from the conviction that the East—along with Greece—represents one of the two great cradles of human knowledge. Therefore, it seemed fitting to launch the first GDKP calculation in the East, beginning with India.

The Limits OF Keynes And His Economic Theories

Since July 1, 1944, economic theory has not been able to align itself with Lord Keynes. But Lord Keynes has his responsibilities. Keynes in the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire wanted a monetary system with a universal currency, but was defeated by Harry Dexter White, the American economist who insisted that the dollar should be the sole referent of the world monetary system. Intriguingly, the Bretton Woods monetary system was paradoxically born from an American engaged in pro-Soviet war espionage, as White was later credibly accused of Soviet espionage (per Venona decrypts and defector testimonies from Chambers and Bentley).

In this regard, it could be argued that it was the Soviet spy White who helped launch the dollar as a world currency supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. White has been erased to a certain extent from economic history textbooks, despite having assisted in promoting the system of fixed exchange rates, in which the King Dollar, from the height of its privileged relationship with the gold of Fort Knox, considered all other currencies as divisional currencies, and until 1971 seemed unassailable. Then came General De Gaulle requesting dollars be changed in gold and the system broke.

The illusion of the fixed exchange rate vanished in 1971 when for the first time the dollar was allowed to float against the other currencies, but White’s dream of the dollar being the only world currency did not vanish. The American government discovered that it could have its wars financed by other currencies.

From Keynes to Guterres: GDP disasters

The differences between White and Keynes are actually much more apparent than substantial. The SM King dollar, the world’s reference currency as hypothesized by White, is in fact the heir to the pound sterling of which Keynes was a careful follower even in reshaping the Indian monetary system. 

The real weakness of Keynes’s hypothesis of universal money is the fact that he himself was not free from a purely material vision of the wealth of nations. In fact, the reigning currency—whether the pound or the dollar—is merely the other side of the GDP coin.

In fact, even for Keynes the wealth of nations is material, and GDP is its measure, and with these premises the hypothesis of a universal currency is unrealistic because in the “productive drunkenness” of the industrial revolution the three fundamental pillars of GDP – those that correctly according to Guterres lead to the exclusion of the anthropic species – are accepted uncritically. 

GDP values more raw materials at the lowest possible price to be obtained by any means. Work at the lowest possible labor cost, with irrelevance of the well-being of the country of production. Absolute uniformity of the products produced sold all over the world. That is, total indifference to the cultural values of a population.

With these premises of GDP, money, both the dollar made king by White and the hypothetical universal one of Keynes, can only reflect a totally materialistic vision of the wealth of nations. This is why the GDP, as correctly stated by Guterres, will inevitably lead to the disappearance of the human race, let it be said for completeness of analysis, with all the other species subjected to the disproportionate anthropic domination. The sky will be a little too cloudy for a few centuries by radioactivity clouds: the ice at the pole will have completely liquefied and finding land will be an adventure; the air will be unbreathable, but there will no longer be species that intend to dominate everything, water, land and air without the slightest consideration of the survival of other species.

But if despite everything, we want to save the human species, it is the GDP, which today Guterres correctly condemns as a danger to survival, that must be changed quickly. But unfortunately in Munich, despite the merits of the speeches heard, no one seemed to move in that direction. They want to change traffic flows, but they always and incessantly aim to increase GDP. And of course, the international monetary system remains incapable of giving birth to the idea of universal money that was Lord Keynes’s wonderful ambition. 

Single Univesal Currency Is Possible Only If The Idea Of Wealth Of Nations Is No Longer Based On GDP

As the first nation in the world, India has decided to calculate the GDKP, Gross Domestic KNOWLEDGE Product. The author of this article has played a role in this. The Center for Digital Future created by Dr. Jeffrey Cole is the site where the first model of GDKP was born: this fact must be brought to Guterres with due urgency because it is one of the phenomena that can reduce the danger of GDP that he rightly highlights. 

For Keynes, India in 1944 was still a British colony. 84 years after Bretton Woods, China has studied technology and competes on an equal footing with the United States; and India has become the largest democratic nation in the world. It is clear that in both phenomena it is the access to knowledge that is the keystone of the great political change that has taken place. It is time for the West to apply itself to studying Indian culture and China’s ability to modernize in forced stages. 

But the GDKP-based calculation of a nation’s wealth is crucial if we want to reform the international monetary system, as seems to be the aspiration of an ever-increasing number of nations. The only possible alternative currency capable of realizing the Keynesian hypothesis defeated by White is Knoweldge Money issued by the only possible alternative issuing bank, which is the United Nations. Many may laugh at this hypothesis, but the United Nations is the only entity capable of creating the universal currency hypothesized by Lord Keynes.

The knowledge currency is the other side of the coin of a different vision of the wealth of nations, based not only and exclusively on the production of material goods. Culture, traditions, folkloristic values, religions (as long as they are not fundamentalist) must enter into the evaluation of a nation’s wealth.  It is time for the West to study Eastern knowledge to avert the dangers brilliantly denounced by Guterres. Because otherwise, as Lord Keynes said in the long run, we all be dead. Let’s hope not.

© Eurasia Review