Toward an Economy of the Common Good. The Experience of Cooperative Credit Banks

"Banks lend you an umbrella when it's sunny and take it away when it rains." Among the many clichés, this is perhaps the most famous, encapsulating all the prejudices people have developed over the centuries, and not always unjustifiably, against those who lend money professionally. Despite this, monetary credit remains one of the key factors, perhaps the driving force par excellence, needed to create material, and therefore social, and ethical, value. While it's true that the production of wealth as an end in itself doesn't foster moral and spiritual development, as Aristotle reminds us in his discussion of chrematistics, it's equally true that people's well-being cannot be separated from the vital condition that physical, real goods provide.
Verdicchio's proposed research path is conducted with an ethical-transformative approach that also identifies (but not only) credit cooperatives as a concrete solution for the creation of a model of the common good economy.
The revival of the thought of philosophers and economists such as Muhammad Yunus, Adriano Olivetti, Karl Marx, Pope Leo XIII, Friedrich W. Raiffeisen, Giuseppe Toniolo, Antonio Genovesi, Christian Felber and Roberto Mancini enrich the text by showing that a more human-scale economic system is not only possible, but practicable and indispensable.

Alfio Verdicchio lives in Loro Piceno, in the Marche region. He has a background in economics and philosophy and has extensive experience in the banking sector, where he has worked for over thirty-four years. Of the last twenty-three, he has spent in cooperative credit.
He currently works in problem credit, a role that allows him to actively support families and businesses in difficulty. He is married with three children.