“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.”

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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If a big country like the United States did return to the gold standard, it would start a great deflation. Most likely …" by Friedrich Hayek?
Friedrich Hayek photo
Friedrich Hayek 79
Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economic… 1899–1992

Related quotes

Friedrich Hayek photo
Alan Greenspan photo
Alan Greenspan photo
John Maynard Keynes photo

“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.

Dexter S. Kimball photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Ai Weiwei photo

“Measuring national prestige by gold medals is like using Viagra to judge the potency of a man.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

“ Gold Is Not the Real Measure of a Nation http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/25/olympics2008.china,” Guardian, August 25, 2008.
2000-09, 2008

Bill Haywood photo

“The mine owners "did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!"”

Bill Haywood (1869–1928) Labor organizer

Haywood, William D. The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood. New York: International Publishers, 1929, p. 171.

Thucydides photo

“they possess most gold and silver, by which war, like everything else, flourishes.”

Book VI, 6.34; "they have abundance of gold and silver, and these make war, like other things, go smoothly" ( trans. http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/jthucbk6rv2.htm Benjamin Jowett)
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VI

Related topics