Matthew C Klein, Columnist

The Gold Standard Wasn't So Bad

Even if you think that the gold standard would be inappropriate right now, the data do not indicate that it was obviously inappropriate then.

April 3, 2013 at 5:24 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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David Stockman, a former Republican congressman and director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been receiving a lot of criticism for his apocalyptic take on the state of American capitalism. Some of the critiques are justified, but others go too far. It is incorrect to describe the U.S. under the classical gold standard (roughly 1870 to 1913) as a "dystopia," as Matt O'Brien did in the Atlantic. Even if you think that the gold standard would be inappropriate right now, the data do not indicate that it was obviously inappropriate then.

Academics have investigated this before. Christina Romer, a Berkeley professor and former adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote the go-to paper in 1999. She found that "real macroeconomic indicators have not become dramatically more stable between the pre-World War I and post-World War II eras." In other words, even if you exclude the Great Depression and the recent crisis, the classical gold standard didn't make the economy more volatile.