Word: return
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Talk about a change takes two forms. One is that the U.S. should junk its present managed-money system (in which gold is used only as a currency reserve and to settle international accounts) and return to the fully convertible gold standard, abandoned in 1933, under which dollars could be exchanged for gold coins. The other-usually joined with the first-is that the U.S. should double or triple the present gold price of $35 an ounce, thus devaluing the dollar and in effect automatically increasing the monetary value of the official gold holdings of the free world...
Among the chief advocates of a return to the full gold standard for both the U.S. and European nations are French Economic Adviser Jacques Rueff, the architect of France's successful financial-austerity program, and Philip Cortney, president of Coty, Inc. and chairman of the U.S. Council of the International Chamber of Commerce...
They, like the rest of a small but dedicated group of economists, believe that the gold standard is the only answer to the world's present monetary problems, such as inflation and a concentration of capital. They believe that a return to the rigid fiscal discipline of the gold standard would act as a brake on inflation by preventing governments from overspending, head off world recessions by doing away with the excesses that lead to them. A full gold standard, as they see it, would also put a damper on sudden expansions of credit not backed by gold, help...
...return to the gold standard would probably have to be accompanied by a price hike in gold to provide more adequate backing for the vast expansion of money and credit in the last few decades. Some economists who do not advocate a return to the gold standard nonetheless want a price hike. They argue that the U.S. has artificially kept gold at a fixed price since 1934, while the prices of the world's goods and services have more than doubled, and that not enough gold has been produced to keep up with the world's economic strides...
...oldfashioned, impracticable, a discipline enforced with the lash. The world has moved on without it." In place of that rigid discipline, nations have built up flexible disciplines better suited to control the ups and downs of the complex modern world, such as the International Monetary Fund. Opponents of return to the standard of a quarter of a century ago insist that the U.S. is already as near to a gold standard as necessary, since gold still backs up its currency, and its dollar can be converted into gold by foreign governments and central banks...