Thanks to Ben Bernanke's lecture today, the gold standard is back as a topic for debate.
While it's easy to talk about the endless crises under the gold standard days of the 1800s, the truth is that we don't have to go back that far at all.
Europe is a close analogue to a gold standard.
Bottom line, it's a hard money scheme in sheep's clothing.
And in fact, the crisis is almost exactly as Bernanke described.
And oh yeah, major bank failures and seemingly endless panic.
Things have calmed down a bit, thanks to the ECB getting a bit more fiat-ish in its approach to money. But if you want to see what it's like when you have a hard, unprintable currency that's designed to keep governments in check, you can just look at the Europe crisis.
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