The Quiet Campaign to Reinstate the Gold Standard is Getting Louder

• The Quiet Campaign to Reinstate the Gold Standard is Getting Louder
  by Natasha Frost & Gwynn GuilfordJuly 3, 2019, https://qz.com/
  The once-fringe fantasy of a return to the gold standard is creeping back into the mainstream. It has long been dismissed as a fool’s errand, on par with abandoning the Federal Reserve and other trappings of the modern economy. Mainstream economists deride it almost without exception. Reintroducing the gold standard would “be a disaster for any large advanced economy,” says the University of Chicago’s Anil Kashyap, who connects enthusiasm for it with “macroeconomic illiteracy.” His colleague, Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, struggles with its very underlying principle: “Why tie to gold? Why not 1982 Bordeaux?”
  –
  Yet the idea that every US dollar should be backed by a small amount of actual gold is more popular than economists’ opinions might suggest. Advocates include members of Congress and president Donald Trump. Enthusiasm for a return to the gold standard has become more prominent since Trump’s most recent nominees to fill the vacant Federal Reserve governorship have endorsed a return. The first two—Herman Cain and Stephen Moore—both dropped out of consideration, but the third, economist Judy Shelton, announced today in a Trump tweet, may be the most ardent in her support.
  –
  Last year, Shelton called for a “new Bretton Woods conference,” akin to the 1944 meeting that established the post-war economic order, perhaps to be held at Mar-a-Lago, where a return to the gold standard could be considered. “We make America great again by making America’s money great again,” she wrote in the journal of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
  –
  Since 2011, at least six states have passed laws recognizing gold and silver as currency; another three are presently contemplating bills of their own. The surprising success of Ron Paul, a Texas Republican Congressman and ardent gold bug, in the 2008 and 2012 elections showed the potency of these ideas among the electorate. In its 2012 and 2016 campaign platforms, the Republican Party called for a commission to investigate the viability of a return to a gold standard system. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill including such a commission in both 2015 and 2017, but both times the proposals died in the Senate. Last year, Alexander Mooney, a Republican representative from West Virginia, took that a step further when he introduced a bill proposing a full-on return to the gold standard. (The bill has no cosponsors and, unsurprisingly, has gone nowhere.)
  –
  read more.

end