Back to gold?

You know the world economy is in trouble when opinion pages are proposing moving the global monetary system back to a gold standard. Indeed, a rather unscientific look at Google’s search timeline shows a significant spike in such talk during economic crises.

This is true of the early 1970s and 1980s, and again right now. One prolific and persistent advocate of the gold standard is Lewis Lehrman, an investment banker who sat on the Gold Commission alongside US presidential-candidate Ron Paul in 1981 and with whom he co-wrote The Case for Gold in 1982. Since then, Lehrman, who is an ex-Morgan Stanley MD and now runs his own firm, has...