> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active

I've got some news for you about modern levels of inequality.

There is an idea floating around that trade imbalances create global inequality (Trade Wars are Class Wars by Klein & Pettis) and the original sin was adopting the dollar as the reserve currency instead of something like Bancor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor)

It depends on how inequalities is defined. But from the wealth distribution point of view, today’s wealth distribution skews much more towards the top. Although the lowest living standards improve thanks to the technology advancement.

The separation of wealth during the Gilded age was caused by the same thing it is caused by today: rapid industrialization. This rapid industrialization began when the US was off the gold standard during the civil war. The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback.

The great depression was triggered in part by imbalanced gold flows when we returned to gold back currencies.

https://explaininghistory.org/2025/06/12/golden-fetters-the-...

We are essentially replaying the greenback inflation of the 1860's and have been doing it since 1971.

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The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350

Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.

Reckless spending post WW2 was the main reason the US shot itself in the foot and got into this position where they couldn't reasonably pay most clients back and France saw this developing.

All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Eh, aren't most of those points non-sequiturs?

> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active:

And the Gilded Age [1] ended long before the gold standard. Which makes sense since the Gilded Age is a political issue not a monetary one; how will the productivity from railroads be redistributed?

> It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability:

A comparison of 35 years against 4?

That's like bragging about how smart private credit is by showing the low volatility in it's price over the past year.

The large concern from gold bugs is that by printing money we just make the next crash even larger. But of course we just print more in the next crash so it doesn't happen. Take a look at the fed balance sheet [2]; under Kaynsian ideology you were supposed to sell that off during the boom years so you can take on debt during the busts but politicians are not disciplined enough to do that so the Gold Standard would've never let them.

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IMO, the real argument against the Gold Standard is that the US left it is because we spent more money than we made to finance the Vietnam War. If we returned to it, then we'd just leave it again when it became inconvenient. It's not the Gold Standard that needs fixing in the country.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

[2]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...