“If the world as a whole returned to the gold standard there would be such fluctuations in the value of gold that it would very soon prove impractical.
Today an international gold standard could only mean that a few countries would maintain a real gold standard. The other countries would hang on to the system through a gold exchange standard — where the currency isn't really redeemable in gold but the government attempts to keep a fixed rate between its currency and gold.”

1980s and later, Interview in Silver & Gold Report (1980)

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Friedrich Hayek79

Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economic… 1899–1992

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“If a big country like the United States did return to the gold standard, it would start a great deflation. Most likely the government couldn't stick to it for long. They'd switch the policy to some halfway measure like a gold exchange standard.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Interview in Silver & Gold Report (1980)

“Are the solutions offered us always to be too late? Shall we in Great Britain invite three-quarters of the world, including the whole of our Empire, to join with us in evolving a new currency system which shall be stable in terms of commodities? Or would the gold standard countries be interested to learn the terms, which must needs be strict, on which we should be prepared to re-enter the system of a drastically reformed gold standard?”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Gold Standard (1931)

“In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), p. 172
Context: Those who advocate the return to a gold standard do not always appreciate along what different lines our actual practice has been drifting. If we restore the gold standard, are we to return also to the pre-war conceptions of bank-rate, allowing the tides of gold to play what tricks they like with the internal price-level, and abandoning the attempt to moderate the disastrous influence of the credit-cycle on the stability of prices and employment? Or are we to continue and develop the experimental innovations of our present policy, ignoring the "bank ration" and, if necessary, allowing unmoved a piling up of gold reserves far beyond our requirements or their depletion far below them? In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

Gold and Economic Freedom http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm 1966 <br class="br">1950–60s

“An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense—perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire—that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

Gold and Economic Freedom http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm 1966 <br class="br">1950–60s

“It has therefore been justly observed that however honestly the coin of a country may conform to its standard, money made of gold and silver is still liable to fluctuations in value, not only to accidental, and temporary, but to permanent and natural variations, in the same manner as other commodities.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter III, On the Rent of Mines, p. 47

“The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed. Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise. And yet the gold standard was the only remaining pillar of the traditional world economy; when it broke, the effect was bound to be instantaneous. To liberal economists the gold standard was a purely economic institution; they refused even to consider it as a part of a social mechanism.”

Karl Polanyi book The Great Transformation

The Great Transformation (1944), Ch. 2 : Conservative Twenties, Revolutionary Thirties

“Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Her Moral; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

“This is truly the age of gold,
since only gold wins and gold reigns.”

Torquato Tasso Aminta

Veramente il secol d'oro è questo,
Poiché sol vince l'oro, e regna l'oro.
Act II, scene i.
Aminta (1573)

“If gold must be gold, it must pass through the furnace.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On the fact that difficulties serve a purpose - "Bewitching Favour" http://www.africanews.com/site/Bewitching_Favour/list_messages/27081 Africa News (September 22 2009)

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