Mythbusting the gold standard

Frik Els | June 5, 2015 | 3:11 pm Precious Metals Europe Gold 
Mythbusting the gold standard

George Selgin of The Cato Institute wants to clear up some of the misconceptions about the gold standard.

The think tank’s senior fellow and director of its Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives is not going after gold bugs (who have been a popular target for derision from economists).

Rather Selgin wants to point out “the errors many economists commit in their eagerness to find fault with that ‘barbarous relic’.”

All of them worth a read:

  1. The Gold Standard wasn’t an instance of government price fixing. Not traditionally, anyway.
  2. A gold standard isn’t particularly expensive. In fact, fiat money tends to cost more.
  3. Gold supply “shocks” weren’t particularly shocking.
  4. The deflation that the gold standard permitted wasn’t such a bad thing.
  5. It wasn’t to blame for 19th-century American financial crises.
  6. On the whole, the classical gold standard worked remarkably well (while it lasted).
  7. It didn’t have to be “managed” by central bankers.
  8. In fact, central banking tends to throw a wrench in the works.
  9. “The “Gold Standard” wasn’t to blame for the Great Depression.
  10. It didn’t manage money according to any economists’ theoretical ideal. But neither has any fiat-money-issuing central bank.

 

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Comments

  • frankinca

    It seems the standard for the definition of money is always being modified to get a local result. The dollar is being modified by the Fed, is evident, thus where is the standard?. So, gold has no equal as a standard and should be considered as the most important defining quality of a monetary currency, if not totally. It is impossible to change the value of gold in a local currency if it is defined correctly and put into a two-thirds type law, except in Sweden, where anything goes, sexually or financially. Like most good controls to maintain quality of a product like MONEY, the main user wants its definition to be modified to suit its own goals and let the others be bound by the original definition. Eventually, this fails as we see now!
    Thanks for the article and its support of the Rickards Doctrine and GOLD miners.

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