24 Words to Understand the Economy

A guide to understanding the mechanisms and language of finance and economic geopolitics.

February 2020: stock markets collapse after the rapid spread of news about the health emergency that would soon develop into the COVID-19 pandemic. It is inevitable: the scenario is unexpected and there are no certainties about the future. After a phase of recovery and relative stability, in April 2025 the world once again finds itself in a similar situation, triggered by President Trump’s decision to impose heavy tariffs on imports globally. The context is very different, but the element that remains unchanged is the difficulty of making sense of the many economic and financial news reports provided by newspapers, which often take a great deal for granted.

Worsening the situation is the severe financial illiteracy affecting the Italian population: we lack the tools to make informed economic decisions, we do not know how to behave during increasingly frequent periods of crisis, and we struggle to decipher what we read on the subject. In this era of uncertainty and concern, the goal of Mariangela Pira—journalist and expert in finance and economic geopolitics—is to provide us with a comprehensive and accessible guide by identifying and analyzing 24 key words that help us navigate the sea of information and make thoughtful decisions.