Concise Takedown of Gold Buggery

Pushing back on the ongoing derailment of the G.O.P. and the commitment of both Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have committed to appoint one of Wall Streets best-know gold bugs to chair the Federal Reserve.  This would be a ReallyBadIdea(tm).  Any romantic notion that a return to the gold standard reflects a poor understanding of history.

The pre-Fed era was characterized by frequent episodes such as the Panic of 1857, Panic of 1873, Panic of 1893, Panic of 1896, and Panic of 1907 in which even the safest borrowers would suddenly find themselves needing to pay a very high rate of interest. Those events were associated with significant financial failures and business contraction. After establishment of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. short-term interest rate became much more stable and exhibited none of the sudden spiking behavior that used to be so common.

 

One of the problems with the gold standard is that when the real value of gold changes (as it does all the time) and the dollar price of an ounce of gold is fixed (as it must be by definition under a gold standard), that means dollar prices have to adjust in response to anything that happens to the gold market. With the economic and financial turbulence of the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was a big increase in the relative price of gold.

For example, to get an ounce of gold in 1929, a farmer would need to deliver a little over a hundred pounds of cotton. By 1932, it would take more than three times as much cotton to get that same ounce of gold. Whereas 18 bushels of wheat would be enough to buy an ounce of gold in 1929, you would have needed more than twice as much wheat to get gold in 1932. And since the price of gold in terms of dollars was fixed between 1929 and 1932, that means you’d need to produce about three times as many pounds of cotton or two times as many bushels of wheat in order to earn one dollar in 1932 as you would have needed to earn one dollar in 1929.

Fiat currency gives the Federal Reserve much more flexibility in dealing with financial panics and other financial turbulence than tying the dollar to the arbitrary value of some random metal.  Why would we give up our sovereignty that way?

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