The Once and Future Gold Standard

The Financial Times on whispers about reviving that golden oldie of international finance: the gold standard.

….musings about a gold standard are currently cropping up in all manner of unlikely places. One savvy European property developer (who aggressively sold most of his holdings in early 2007) recently told me that he is now moving a growing proportion of his assets from government bonds into gold, even at today's elevated prices.

"The logical conclusion of where we will end up eventually is with some type of gold standard," he explains, arguing that future inflation will almost inevitably cause a future collapse in government bonds.

Half a world away in the Middle East, some sovereign wealth funds now say that they are stocking up enthusiastically on food and gold, due to similar reasoning.

Meanwhile, in New York a (still) formidable American hedge fund recently circulated private research that echoes the reasoning of Mr Smith. Most notably, this hedge fund points out that since the world abandoned the gold standard on August 15, 1971 credit creation has spiralled completely out of control.

But this four-decade long experiment with fiat currency is not just something of a historical aberration, it argues – but potentially very fragile too. After all, the only thing that ever underpins a fiat currency is a belief that governments are credible. In the past 18 months that belief has been tested to its limits. In coming years it could be shattered, particularly if the current wave of extraordinary policy measures unleashes a wild bout of inflation….

It might seem almost unthinkable to propose a return to a gold standard, in other words. However, the key point is that the last 18 months have already produced a stream of once unimaginable events.

Back in August 2007, I interviewed Nathan Lewis about his possibly prescient book Gold: The Once and Future Money and the prospects for some variety of a new gold standard.