Guido Carli

Carli's professional activity was divided between law and economics. 

Guido Carli was born in Brescia, on March 28, 1914, to Filippo and Egina Chiaretti, where his father, a sociologist and economist, had worked for many years.

The family environment in which he lived was typical of the Italian professional upper middle class, characterized by an education aimed at instilling a strong sense of individual and social duty, frugality in lifestyle, and a love of learning and culture. From an intellectual point of view, the environment he encountered at the Faculty of Law in Padua was decisive, as were the lessons of his father, who was committed to grafting economic nationalism and corporatist doctrine onto the roots of liberalism.

Carli publicly expressed his aversion to fascist economic policy on several occasions. During his university years, he studied under Marco Fanno, an economist of the Einaudi school, who guided him toward liberal economic theories and supervised his graduation in the academic year 1935–36.

Carli’s professional career spanned both law and economics, with a specialization in the institutional issues of monetary stability and the free movement of goods and capital. He devoted much of his energy to these fields while serving in various public and private institutions over nearly half a century.

This specialization led him, in the immediate post-war period and until his death, to become one of the key figures in Italy’s institutional transformation, from a closed society with a protected economy to an open society with a market economy, contributing to the development of both national and supranational institutional mechanisms, particularly in the monetary sphere

His first professional experiences date back to the mid-1930s at IRI, where he worked under the guidance of Pasquale Saraceno. In 1945, on the recommendation of the Italian Liberal Party, which he had joined in 1943, he entered the National Council.

In 1947, he participated in the delegation negotiating Italy’s accession to the Bretton Woods agreements and was subsequently appointed Executive Director on the Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 1948, he was named General Consultant to the Italian Exchange Office by President Einaudi.

After holding numerous domestic and international posts, he became Director General of the Bank of Italy in 1959 and Governor in 1960, succeeding Menichella. This was the most significant period of his career, during which he strengthened the Bank’s Research Department, turning it into a leading school of economics.

In 1975, he decided to voluntarily leave the Bank of Italy, opting for entrepreneurial activity. In 1976, he became president of Impresit International (a FIAT group company) and, in this capacity, accepting Gianni Agnelli's proposal, he assumed the presidency of Confindustria.

Another initiative in 1978 was the secular re-founding of the Catholic university Pro Deo, which was renamed LUISS (Libera università internazionale degli studi sociali, or Free International University of Social Studies) and today bears the name Guido Carli.

On June 26, 1983, he began the last phase of his public life, with a direct involvement in politics, when he was elected senator in the ranks of the Christian Democrats, first in the Milan constituency and then in Brescia. He was Minister of the Treasury in the sixth and seventh Andreotti governments.

From 1985 to 1990, he was elected city councilor in Comacchio, his family's hometown, where he made an authoritative contribution.

He died in Spoleto on April 23, 1993.