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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently launched the highest profile assault on the gold standard since President Richard Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. The Wall Street Journal headlined its report “Bernanke Defends Country’s Break With the Gold Standard.”
“The gold standard would not be feasible for both practical reasons and policy reasons,” Bernanke told students at George Washington University on March 20. “I understand the impulse, but I think if you look at actual history the gold standard didn’t work well.”
One wishes that Bernanke would have taken a moment to make a clear distinction between “didn’t work well” and the characterization of it as “highly successful” made by noted authority and Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke in a 2004 speech at Washington and Lee University.
“The gold standard appeared to be highly successful from about 1870 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. During the so-called ‘classical gold standard period,’ international trade and capital flows expanded markedly, and central banks experienced relatively few problems ensuring that their currencies retained their legal value,” he said then.
And the quality of a gold-linked dollar has become more, not less, accepted since 2004. The Bank of England published a paper titled “Financial Stability Paper No. 13 — December 2011, Reform of the International Monetary and Financial System.” It makes a startling observation:
“The paper sets out three objectives for a well-functioning IMFS: i) internal balance, ii) allocative efficiency and iii) financial stability. The IMFS has functioned under a number of different regimes over the past 150 years and each has placed different weights on these three objectives. Overall, the evidence is that today’s system has performed poorly against each of its three objectives, at least compared with the Bretton Woods System,” the paper says.
In plain English: The contemporary world dollar standard has been a great disappointment percent — a failure — compared with the very diluted form of the gold standard established under the Bretton Woods regime.
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