The article was written by Barry Eichengreen, the Berkeley economics professor and longstanding deprecator of gold.
Mr Eichengreen, for instance, wants emerging economies to discourage short-term capital inflows to minimise exchange-rate volatility.
Barry Eichengreen wrote in 2007 that euro membership was effectively irreversible because withdrawal would be too traumatic.
Mr Eichengreen also argues that standards for debt restructuring could lessen the impact of panics when they do occur.
Mr Eichengreen points out that the dollar had no international role in 1914 but had overtaken sterling in governments' reserves by 1925.
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For Eichengreen has done more than arguably any other individual to create and sustain the false impression that the gold standard caused the Great Depression.
But do we have to have Barry Eichengreen piling on the old gold standard once again as he did in the introduction to the article?
As Eichengreen nicely noted, the gold standard is not phlogiston.
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Leading public intellectuals like Eichengreen have been slow to notice that conservatives, not the libertarians, are the leading force for the restoration of the gold standard.
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Even if one does not like what comes off Mr Eichengreen's drawing board, his effort is worthwhile, since he also provides a handy rough guide to some of the alternatives.
Instead of the sweeping proposals that have been championed since the Mexican peso crisis of 1994, Mr Eichengreen proposes a series of reforms, at both the national and multilateral level, to deal with the most pernicious problems of global capital flows.
Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley and Michael Bordo of Rutgers University identify 139 financial crises between 1973 and 1997 (of which 44 took place in high-income countries), compared with a total of only 38 between 1945 and 1971.
Whatever you think about the merits of the classical gold standard (and I think this article by Barry Eichengreen has it about right) and however dissatisfied people may be with the economic performance delivered by the Federal Reserve, there are no grounds for believing this proposal would provide the U.S. with sound money and economic stability.
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