THE GOLD STANDARD AND ECONOMIC STABILITY: A COUNTERFACTUAL EXPERIMENT

Growing dissatisfaction with the record of discretionary monetary policy in the United States in the past decade has led to interest in alternative monetary arrangements to restore price level and real output stability, and to allow the economy to grow to its potential, unfettered by macro instability. Several arrangements have come to the fore. These include: (1) a return to the classical gold standard—fixing the dollar price of gold and allowing the money supply to be governed by movements in the nation's monetary gold stock; (2) the Friedman (1960) rule—constraining the monetary authorities to establish and maintain a steady and known growth rate of the fiduciary money supply; (3) Irving Fisher's (1920) compensated dollar scheme—altering the official price of gold and hence the value of the monetary gold stock to stabilize some measure of the price level.