The gold standard was a major cause of the world’s two worst economic depressions.
Evidence
Today, many seemingly sensible people on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly in the United States, seem to think that the solution to any and all economic problems lies in returning to something called the gold standard. This is odd because apart from being a heavy, shiny rock, gold has no particular noteworthy features—besides being a major contributory cause of the two worst economic depressions in world history: the 1870s and the 1930s. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 485
Categorization
- XREF: Feeds directly into the reader’s austerity/neoliberalism program; ties the gold standard to interwar British depression in the Matthews/Milward literature. — connects to: Gold-standard return caused depressions across Britain, Japan, and France — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 557; Rising democratic power forced the gold standard into terminal crisis — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 415; The gold standard self-corrected trade imbalances through domestic price and wage adjustment. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 490
- SEED: Angle: a debunk of modern gold-standard revivalism that grounds the case in the 1870s and 1930s depressions rather than abstract monetary theory.
Broader Connections
- Gold-standard return caused depressions across Britain, Japan, and France
#corroborates(0.95) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 557 - Rising democratic power forced the gold standard into terminal crisis
#expands(0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 415 - The gold standard self-corrected trade imbalances through domestic price and wage adjustment.
#contradicts(0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 490