Conclusion. Looking back on the forty years since policymakers unlinked the dollar from gold , though we’ve made astounding economic progress, it’s important that we consider the unseen in this equation. While it’s our nature to evolve and innovate, what will forever remain unknown is just how much more advanced we’d be if the dollar’s stability had remained policy.
Floating money values have fostered ever more frequent recessions, financial crises, and faulty investment decisions that have hampered our advancement. Worse, they’ve forced the term “inflation hedge” into the investment discussion such that capital flows toward the immobile asset classes of yesterday, and away from the less taxable intellectual concepts of tomorrow.
Ever-enterprising individuals can thrive no matter the chaos foisted on them by feckless monetary authorities. But the question is how much more successful we’d all be if money had maintained its simple purpose as the facilitator of trade and investment. Floating money values, though not a policy of the past, will, if allowed, author our descent into it. To reverse a needless decline, it’s essential that we revert to the historical norm of stable, gold-defined money values that are so essential to a thriving, evolving economy.
John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets and Forbes Opinions, a senior economic adviser to H.C. Wainwright Economics, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research and Trading.
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