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........

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