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Seth Lipsky is an articulate and leading proponent of the gold standard.
He is saying, and TheGoldStandardNow.org agrees, that the moment for gold is: now.
He has been described as a journalistic icon. His Columbia Journalism School faculty biography summarizes his journalistic career as "founding editor of The New York Sun and The Forward newspapers. He helped found two others, The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal Europe. He is a former member of the editorial board and foreign editor of The Wall Street Journal. He was a roving correspondent in Asia for The Wall Street Journal and a combat reporter in Vietnam for Pacific Stars and Stripes."
The New York Sun recently editorialized:
This is what happened in the early 1980s, which we’d thought was a marvelous moment for monetary reform. After the great inflation unleashed by the failure of the Johnson and Nixon administrations to make hard fiscal choices during the Vietnam War — Johnson insisted on both guns and butter — the dollar collapsed to less than an 800th of an ounce of gold from the 35th of an ounce that it had been at, by law, during the years of Bretton Woods. So in 1981 Congress set up the United States Gold Commission, also known as the Reagan Commission, to look into what role gold might play in a monetary reform in America.
Eventually the commission rejected the idea of a return to gold, though it issued a famous minority report by two of its members, Lewis Lehrman and Ron Paul. But a the dollar was rescued, at least for a while, by the rise of Paul Volcker to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve. His was a long reign of tight money that conquered inflation and started moving the value of the dollar back up. Mr. Volcker was able to do this because his tight money regime was operated in tandem with the tax cuts and other supply-side measures being put through by President Reagan.
The combination of policies touched off the Reagan boom, which ran through what the editor of the Wall Street Journal called “seven fat years,” and eventually it was extended into the 1990s and, after some retreats, into the 21st Century under George Bush. It is astonishing, at least to us, to think that at the start of George W. Bush’s administration, in January 2001, a dollar was worth a 265th of an ounce of gold.
What nags at us is the question of whether the momentum for monetary reform which gathered as the catastrophe of the collapse of the dollar has come into focus could be lost in the economic growth we are experiencing today. The answer to the question, in our view, is that there are three circumstances when it makes sense to move to a system of sound money. One is when a currency is collapsing. Two is when it is steady. And three is when it is appreciating. What one really wants, in other words, is the confidence that the dollar will remain exchangeable for gold over a long period and that people will have confidence in that.
Lipsky is saying, and TheGoldStandardNow.org agrees, that the moment for gold is: now.
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