Chapter 1: The Classical Gold Standard

Read Chapter 1 of The Gold Standard here

[This part of the book is based on real history, and events here are real.]

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Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants, and debt is the money of slaves.

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To understand the economic history of the twentieth century, we must first examine the monetary system that dominated at its inception. The classical gold standard era, from 1873 to 1914, represented the first time since antiquity that Western civilization was using the same monetary standard. And given European industrial and economic advancement over the rest of the world, by the end of the nineteenth century, the classical gold standard had arguably extended to the whole planet, as most of the world was now using gold as money, or gold-backed currencies, while only a few governments still clung to the silver standard and became increasingly marginalized economically, with the largest capital holders in their territories shifting to gold.

Why Gold?

But why did money concentrate in gold and silver, and then gold alone? The answer can be best understood with reference to these metals having the lowest growth rate of their stockpiles. A detailed study of monetary history shows that, at any time and place, whatever is used as money is whatever fungible, divisible, groupable, and transportable good happens to have the lowest stockpile growth rates.

For instance, pre-industrial societies used seashells that were very hard to find. Societies that had not invented glass production used imported glass beads as money. Islands that had no limestone used limestone as money, because limestone could only be obtained at great risk and cost from other faraway islands, making their supply difficult to increase. Prisoners use cigarettes as money because they usually cannot be manufactured in prison, and getting new ones is difficult.

As metallurgy began to spread, metals proved remarkably suited for serving as money, as they were fungible, divisible, groupable, and transportable. Iron, copper, silver, and gold had all been used as money, but over time, the first three metals gradually lost their monetary role to gold, the hardest-to-make monetary metal, because their supplies could be increased at rates faster than that of gold’s supply.

It is remarkable that the rise of the gold standard did not occur through the efforts of any conscious designer or government mandate. The majority of the world had dealt with gold, silver, and copper as money for centuries. There was no international treaty between governments that would give gold monetary primacy and mandate the demonetization of silver. Individual governments had usually sought to maintain the monetary role of silver alongside gold, but they were powerless to do so in the face of overwhelming monetary incentives shaped by technological reality.

Gold kept growing in prominence, and governments’ regulations either facilitated its wider adoption to the benefit of their people, or impotently attempted to stymie its growth at the expense of their people’s economic well-being. Whether it was through rational consideration leading people to abandon alternative moneys for gold or through the holders of these moneys bleeding wealth to supply inflation far faster than gold holders, the end result has been the same everywhere in the world: the vast majority of wealth was concentrated in the hands of the holders of the monetary good that was the hardest to produce and had the lowest liquid stockpile growth rate.

Gold is distinct from the three other monetary metals in that it is chemically stable and practically impossible to destroy. It is the only one of these metals that does not corrode, disintegrate, rust, or tarnish. This means that all the gold humanity has produced over thousands of years remains available today, used as gold. Whereas the other metals’ stockpiles are constantly disintegrating, gold’s stockpiles just continue to grow.

This means that, at any given time, the liquid stockpiles of gold held by people worldwide are orders of magnitude larger than any year’s production. Data from the past century indicates the annual production of gold is usually in the range of 1.5%–2% of total stockpiles. Even if production were to increase through large discoveries of gold or increases in the productivity of mining processes, the increased supply growth rate will be transitory and self-defeating, as it is added to the existing stockpiles, making the denominator in the supply growth rate larger, bringing the supply growth rate down.

Since silver, copper, and iron are constantly being consumed and ruined, their fungible liquid stockpiles are constantly declining, resulting in new production constituting a larger fraction of existing stockpiles as production becomes more efficient and as industrial uses increase.[1]

From the most primitive seashell to the most sophisticated modern gold bank, the choice of monetary medium has always been one determined by the market and subject to the iron forces of economic incentives. Governments enforced the market’s choice, benefitting from obeying it and suffering when opposing it.

By the start of the nineteenth century, money was gold and silver virtually everywhere, iron had lost its monetary role long ago, and copper’s monetary role was confined to increasingly inconsequential small change. For millennia, under what came to be known as bimetallism, governments would mint gold and silver into fixed-weight coins and put their imprint on these coins to make them fungible and easy to trade, obviating the need for weighing and measuring irregular chunks of gold and thus making trade easier and less costly. However, the variations in the price of gold in relation to silver created a problem for monetary authorities, who would have liked to fix the price between their silver and gold denominations to facilitate trade, but the vagaries of supply and demand constantly shifted the price away from the desired fixed ratio.

Bimetallism and Its Discontents

The classical gold standard emerged from the increasingly unworkable nature of the bimetallic monetary system that had dominated the world for millennia. Both gold and silver were used as money. Gold’s higher value per unit of weight gave it the leading role for larger transactions, whereas silver’s lower value made it the dominant choice for lower-value transactions.

The gold-silver ratio, which measures how many ounces of silver one needs to purchase an ounce of gold, has changed significantly throughout history, but nothing like its changes in the last century. Before 550 BC, we have records of the ratio varying between as little as 2 and as high as 21. Around 1000 BC the price was 3 in ancient Egypt thanks to the abundance of gold in the Nubian mines. In Phoenicia around 800–600 BC, the ratio was around 8 to 12. In the Levant, it was around 6 to 7; and in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, around 8 to 10. In the 7th century BC, the price in Persia was at 13 to 1. In Ancient Greece, the price was around 10 in the 4th Century BC. In the Roman Empire, Emperor Augustus fixed the price at 12 to 1 in the year 23 BC.[2]

The debasement of the silver denarius led to the rise in desirability of gold and the rise of the GSR to 14 to 18, but the restoration of the Roman Empire in Constantinople led to the decline of the ratio to the range of 12 to 14. In the Islamic world, the ratio was closer to 10 to 15 from the 7th century AD, and under the Ottomans, from 1500 onward, the ratio was around 12 to 15. Medieval Europe saw silver appreciate to as little as a 9 to 4 GSR after the Black Death, but the ratio returned to the 12 to 15 range. The influx of silver from the new world to Europe around 1500–1800 stabilized the ratio around 15.[3]

As global trade became more advanced, cheaper, and widespread, the price harmonized globally. By the 17th century a global steady price of approximately 15 prevailed in the majority of the world’s major markets and economies. But then, in the nineteenth century, modern banking, banknotes, checkbooks, the telegraph and train, making trade more efficient, all conspired to undermine silver’s monetary role. But the market rate had remained fixed around 15 because of many governments imposing that rate.

The intractable problem of bimetallism was that, being market goods, silver and gold would fluctuate in value as a result of variations in supply and demand conditions, causing them to diverge from any fixed exchange rate monetary authorities would set between their two denominations.

If the exchange rate was set between the two and then the price of silver rose, the government’s monetary standard presented an opportunity for arbitrage: any citizen could acquire gold coins and exchange them at the mint for silver coins at the fixed rate set by the government. In effect, the citizen was getting cheap silver from the government, which he could then export abroad and sell for gold at the prevailing foreign market rate, thus obtaining a larger quantity of gold than he had started with.

By fixing the exchange rate, governments would necessarily undervalue one of the metals as soon as the market exchange rate between them moved slightly, which would drive the undervalued metal out of its borders and flood its markets with the overvalued metal.

It was through the process of bimetallic arbitrage that the classical gold standard emerged, thanks to the genius of the great English physicist Isaac Newton. Having dedicated his life to alchemy and developing a deep understanding of the processing of precious metals, Newton was appointed the warden of The Royal Mint. He set the bimetallic ratio to undervalue silver, as in the example above, which led to silver leaving Britain and gold flooding in. Newton described this process in a report to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury on 21 September, 1717.

And according to this rate [in England], a pound weight of fine gold is worth Fifteen pounds weight six ounces seventeen penny weight & five grains of fine silver ... Gold is ... in Spain and Portugal of Sixteen times more value [than] Silver of equal weight and allay ... In France a pound weight of fine Gold is [reckoned] worth Fifteen pounds weight of fine Silver ... In China and Japan one pound weight of fine Gold is worth but Nine or ten pounds weight of fine Silver; & in East India it may be worth Twelve ... And it appears by experience as well as by reason that Silver flows from those places where its value is lowest in proportion to Gold, as from Spain to all Europe & from all Europe to the East Indies, China & Japan; & that Gold is most plentiful in those places in which its value is highest in proportion to silver, as in Spain and England.[4]

By this overvaluation of gold compared to the global markets, Britain was effectively on a gold standard, with silver progressively marginalized, until 1816, when the Coinage Act defined the pound in terms of gold and prohibited the use of silver for transactions larger than 40 shillings.

As silver continued to decline in value compared to gold, the British people’s money and wealth appreciated, as did the Spanish people’s wealth, while countries on silver became poorer through their money’s devaluation. Asian countries were harmed over the coming decades by their overvaluation of silver. They lost their gold and accumulated a significant amount of silver, whose supply increased at a higher rate than that of gold; as a result, it subsequently lost value in relation to gold, particularly after 1870.

It is impossible to understand the economic supremacy of Europe over Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without this monetary context.

There are important technological factors to which the decline in silver value can be attributed. Increased productivity, specialization, and division of labor meant people were engaged in more trade, and physical coins became increasingly inconvenient for an increasing number of trades. Coins are inconveniently expensive to divide into precise quantities for trade. It was far easier to use paper notes backed by physical money, as these are lighter, cheaper to transport, less conspicuous, and more easily exchanged for smaller or larger denominations.

Paper receipts for physical money became an increasingly common medium of exchange, obviating the need for holding physical money and increasing demand for holding gold in bank vaults while its receipts circulated.

Facilitated by the rise of industrial engines and electricity, the speed and distances at which trade takes place increased beyond the capacity of physical money to move with every physical trade. This led to a significant rise in reliance on banking institutions, with checks and bank transfers accounting for a progressively larger percentage of total trades.

As these transactions all took place on bank balance sheets, there was little incentive to hold the easier silver money for conducting them, and demand for silver continued to decline compared to demand for gold. The market value of cash balances in gold continued to grow while balances in silver stagnated or declined. The greater the cash balances in a particular market good, the more significant its monetary role. Money, after all, is the good with the largest cash balances, and people spend as money the goods in which they have large holdings.

If silver’s monetary role had relied on its lower value, making it more convenient for small transactions, paper and credit money obviated that role. Why use paper backed by silver for small denominations when you could just as easily use paper backed by gold, which holds its value better? Further, using the same metal for large and small transactions meant no fluctuating exchange rate between moneys.

No longer were kings and nobility the only ones who could afford gold as their money; everyone could hold gold in the form of small-denomination paper backed by gold. The hardest money in the world became increasingly available to more and more people worldwide.

While the demise of silver was a centuries-long process driven by economic incentives, the decisive event that ended silver’s monetary role was a clear historical moment: the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. At the end of the war, France was on a bimetallic standard of gold and silver, while newly united Germany was the world’s largest silver-standard industrial economy.

It was obvious that silver was declining, and Germany astutely seized the opportunity its victory presented by taking its indemnity from France in gold and using that gold as the new basis for its monetary cash balances. After officially adopting the gold standard in 1873, Germany experienced remarkable economic growth over the following decades, while silver’s gradual decline accelerated. Also in 1873, the United States Congress passed the Coinage Act, which ended the minting of silver into monetary coins by the United States Mint and effectively put the US on a gold standard.

In 1900, the Gold Standard Act legally defined the dollar as 23.22 grains of fine gold and formalized the gold standard explicitly.

The Latin Monetary Union (LMU) was a monetary coinage convention adopted in 1865 between Belgium, France, Italy, and Switzerland to standardize the denominations of coins across these countries and their precious metal content. Greece joined in 1867, and many countries and colonies adopted all or some of the coin specifications without formally joining the LMU.

The LMU specified the exchange rate between its members’ silver and gold coins, making the two metals interchangeable at a price of 15.5 ounces of silver per ounce of gold. But in the wake of the American and German switch to the gold standard, the price of silver plummeted, making the LMU’s gold/silver price unsustainable.

Citizens of LMU countries could purchase silver and send it to the local mint to make coinage, and then convert that coinage to gold at the specified rate. Since the rate overvalued silver, they would end up with more gold than the amount they had used to purchase physical silver. This profit came at the expense of the government’s mint.

The LMU de facto switched to a gold standard in 1873, then formally limited the minting of silver coins in 1874. With the price continuing to decline, the LMU suspended minting silver coins completely in 1878.[5]

With Germany, the United States, France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and Greece all practically going on a gold standard in the 1870s and joining Britain, Holland, and Sweden, the vast majority of the world’s economic output and trade was now gold-based.

This era also marked the emergence of economic globalization. Even countries that weren’t formally on a gold standard used gold extensively in trade. Anyone, anywhere, could now trade with anyone, anywhere, using the same monetary unit, with no concern for exchange rate fluctuations or monetary instability.

A gold coin could travel the world, and banks based on gold built ever-widening settlement and clearance networks, facilitating ever-cheaper trading by crediting transfers and settling them collectively with periodic rebalancing. This resulted in an unparalleled economic boom that was to last for decades, though it was punctuated by frequent severe financial crises.

When goods flow peacefully across borders, bombs and armies become far less likely to cross them, and the end of the nineteenth century was relatively peaceful, although it too was punctuated by crises. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, there were no wars pitting the major European powers against each other except the Turkish-Russian war of 1877–78, but imperial ambitions meant a constant threat of major conflicts breaking out.

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The Classical Gold Standard’s Achilles’ Heel

However, the classical gold standard had a major problem that prevented it from functioning optimally in its ideal form: the incessant extension of bank credit without corresponding savings.

In 1912, at the young age of thirty, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote The Theory of Money and Credit, which astutely identified the root of, and the enormous implications of, the problems with the classical gold standard.

Mises identified two types of credit issued by banks. The first was commodity credit, which is credit for which the bank has full backing in terms of savings at the bank equal to the entire sum of the loan, and which is deposited for the entire duration of the loan. The second was circulation credit, where the bank has no savings matching the loan’s sum and duration.

Should there be a discrepancy between the quantity of credit the bank borrows and the quantity it lends, or a discrepancy between the maturity dates, then the bank is no longer engaged in lending commodity credit, but rather in circulating credit. In this case, the bank is not merely transferring the money of savers to entrepreneurs; it is issuing credit that is being used as money, effectively inflating the money supply and causing substantial consequences.

Money, Mises explained, is unique in that it is the one good that is obtained purely to be exchanged for something else. It is not consumed, like consumer goods, nor is it used in the production of other goods, as capital goods are.

Since its sole purpose is to be passed on and it performs no physical function for its owner, a claim on it, or a substitute for it, is capable of playing its role in a way that cannot be played by any substitute or claim on another consumer or capital good. A voucher for a steak cannot be eaten, and a receipt for a machine cannot produce the goods that the machine produces, but a receipt for money can be used to settle payment just like the money itself.

Due to the unique nature of money, monetary substitutes can apparently serve the functions of money. They can be acquired and spent as payment for goods or services without having to be redeemed for money at the issuing bank. The banknotes or bank accounts that the bank issues as circulation credit are themselves the medium of exchange, without requiring redemption for money.

By producing credit and paper without full backing with savings, banks and central banks were effectively creating new money to add to the money supply. Even though the entire reason gold was money was that its supply is hard to increase, banks had managed to create monetary instruments that were as good as gold by generating credit without backing and then having their customers use this credit as money.

Rather than long hours in labs trying to unravel the mystery of the philosopher’s stone, alchemy in the nineteenth century was carried out every day by bankers issuing credit without corresponding savings.

But of course, there is no free lunch in economics, and the creation of more money had to come at a cost. In his masterpiece, Mises explained that the extension of credit without savings covering the entire sum of the loan results in the recurring financial and monetary crises that plagued both the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

When a government allows banks to suspend redemption of their notes and credit for gold, it effectively turns these instruments into money themselves, causing a decline in their value compared to gold. As Mises concluded:

Attempts to carry out economic reforms from the monetary side can never amount to anything but an artificial stimulation of economic activity by an expansion of the circulation, and this, as must constantly be emphasized, must necessarily lead to crisis and depression. Recurring economic crises are nothing but the consequence of attempts, despite all the teachings of experience and all the warnings of the economists, to stimulate economic activity by means of additional credit.[6]

Mises had astutely identified the Achilles’ heel of the classical gold standard: banking monopolies could engage in inflationary credit expansion, which would cause recessions and financial crises and increase the supply of money substitutes on the market. This, in turn, would cause a decline in the value of money substitutes that offset the rise in their value caused by increased productivity.

He would be proven correct in the most devastating way imaginable within three years of the publication of his book.

The primitive nature of the classical gold standard would become apparent as people engaged in the same predictable herd behavior every few years, with little awareness or ability to change course. “This time is different” was a constant refrain among people involved in financial markets, as inflationary credit expansion created several large and destructive speculative bubbles.

The pattern repeated frequently: banking monopolies would extend credit cautiously at first, increasing the money supply imperceptibly to most people, with little impact on prices. Instead of declining slightly (as would be expected due to gold’s low supply growth rate), prices would increase slightly.

Most people would neither notice nor understand why. Asset prices would also rise, which would drive speculative manias, particularly in new economic sectors. The more cautious the inflation, the longer the inflationary monetary policy could go on, which in turn encouraged banks to become more inflationary and walk too close to the edge of the monetary cliff, so to speak.

A perverse competitive dynamic would then develop between the banks, wherein the most conservative and most honest would lose their market share to the most reckless and most inflationary. Banks would gradually increase their credit creation until they reached a point where they created speculative manias and bubbles in various sectors of the economy, typically in new sectors and industries with rapid growth.

At a certain point, like chickens coming home to roost, an excess of outstanding bills would come back to the bank for redemption in gold. The banks’ vaults would not have enough gold for this.

In normal times, this would be considered fraud, and the owners and managers of the bank would be held criminally liable for issuing redeemable financial instruments that cannot be redeemed. But in the nineteenth century, with this practice growing increasingly common, and with banks increasingly powerful and influential thanks to the centralization of gold in their vaults, banks, governments, and bank-financed media and academia came to see this as an inexplicable quirk of the gold standard, and a temporary problem which could be rectified with the correct policies.

The broad outlines of the deal between governments and banks under the classical gold standard went like this: governments would pretend to be regulating banks but, in reality, they would simply use their oversight to enforce banking oligopolies, which would allow the bank significant leeway in expanding credit beyond its gold holdings.

In exchange, the banks would use their expanded credit to purchase government bonds, which government regulators would treat as being as good as gold for the purposes of the bank’s reserve requirements. The quid pro quo was great for banks, as it allowed them to create money without an opportunity cost.

It was great for governments, too, as they could finance their wars or projects with the credit the banks used to lend to them. Government money allowed banks to leverage their customers’ deposits to create more credit money and lend it to the government.

This was usually done in a surreptitious manner, or advertised as being some genius scheme for the purpose of “boosting the economy,” “stimulating demand,” “bolstering public finance,” or various other euphemisms.

As long as this arrangement held, the purchasing power of money declined, or it did not rise as much as it could. When the issue of credit money increased significantly and redemption requests strained the bank, a bank run would happen, and its resolution would be a complicated legal matter in which blame could be ascribed to particular individuals but not to the inherently unstable system.

But the vast majority of people did not understand the very simple reality of what was going on: their wealth was being stolen by banks and governments.

By suspending the redemption of gold, providing money from the public treasury, or issuing more government bonds to finance the insolvent bank, the bank could continue to operate, its financial instruments could maintain value, and a painful collapse was avoided.

But these measures effectively transfer the bank’s liabilities onto the shoulders of future taxpayers. These practices constituted a highly rewarding form of ‘punishment’ for financial mismanagement, and they encouraged banks to engage in more and riskier inflationary credit creation.

They also succeeded in portraying the suspension of redemption as a necessary corrective measure for markets to resume operations, rather than acknowledging that it is a sure sign of fraud, embezzlement, or catastrophic loss. This repeated pattern meant that the classical gold standard was plagued with financial crises throughout the nineteenth century.

The pattern was set for government intervention in the banking system, and for a political dynamic as dangerous as the dynamic of banking leverage excess. The more leverage the banks took on, the more they became insolvent, and the more the banks’ arms in the media, academia, and politics would call for more government intervention and bailouts of the banks.

This, in turn, served to encourage further irresponsibility on the part of the banks, which then led to even greater government intervention and support. The process inevitably culminated in the centralization of reserves into a central bank owned by the major banking cartels and granted monopoly status by governments.

The result of this constant inflation is that the money supply grew a lot more than the growth in the supply of gold. This expansion would accelerate until the bubbles burst and a solvency crisis hit the affected bank, causing the money supply to shrink. Asset prices would rise during the bubble phase and crash during the bust, and consumer good prices largely behaved similarly, though less extremely.

The fundamental distinguishing feature of the classical gold standard was its reliance on central banks to facilitate its operations. As communication and transportation advanced in the nineteenth century, making trade across distances increasingly common, bank reserves had to be increasingly centralized to facilitate trade quickly.

The average distance between a man and his money grew steadily as bank reserves became more centralized. Not only was he no longer taking possession of his money, but increasingly larger fractions of it were not even held in his own bank. Instead, they were held in the bank’s head branch or the regional or national central bank.

Without a quick and cheap mechanism for moving gold, it had to be held away from transacting parties. At the time, the Bank of England was the center of the financial universe, and its pound sterling was recognized worldwide for being as good as gold.

The creditworthiness of the British government, its powerful military, and its unrivaled global payments settlement network had given it the supreme position in the global financial order, with around half of global foreign exchange reserves held in sterling.

The Bank of England operated a gold exchange standard for British colonies worldwide. Under the gold exchange standard, foreign central banks were relieved of the trouble of having to perform clearance of physical gold or take custody of gold by instead using the paper notes and credit lines of the Bank of England.

As more remote territories joined the global economy and traded with one another, it became far more convenient for them to deal with the world through the Bank of England. Gold at the Bank of England was faster than gold outside it.

As the British Empire expanded, the clearance market for the Bank of England grew larger and more liquid, making it increasingly sensible for global banks to rely on a balance at the Bank of England for global trade.

Since the colonies used the bank to settle their international payments, they were expected to hold significant amounts of these reserves at the Bank of England and not seek redemption in gold. Since taking custody of their gold was expensive, most central banks rarely did it.

The more countries placed their gold at the Bank of England, the more the Bank of England could expand the supply of its paper and credit without commensurate gold backing. This allowed the bank a certain inflationary margin, to the point that by 1913, the ratio of official reserves to liabilities to foreign monetary authorities was only 31%.[7]

As long as fewer than 69% of the liabilities were seeking redemption at any point in time, this arrangement worked fine. The Bank of England used its reserves to issue more liabilities, benefiting its shareholders and the British government, which borrowed from it at the lowest interest rates in the world.

The bank had exported its inflation to the colonies, financing itself and the British government by devaluing the savings of people worldwide but placing itself in a precarious liquidity position. So long as most colonies, depositors, and paper holders did not ask to convert their bank accounts and notes to gold, liquidity would not be a problem.

Even in the absence of an official central bank, the gold standard required the progressive centralization of reserves to facilitate clearance and settlement across increasingly long distances, as was the case in the United States, where major national banks held the lion’s share of reserves.

After Russia’s central bank switched from a silver standard to a gold standard in 1897, the US became the last remaining major economy on a gold standard without a central bank. This anomaly would change on Christmas in 1913, as all the world’s major economies then had central banks on a gold standard.

Only nine months later, centralization of reserves, monopolization of banking, and the increasing tendency for inflation through credit creation would all add fuel to the fire of a war in the Balkans that would become humanity’s most brutal and consequential, threatening to incinerate human civilization itself.

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References

[1] Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 32; Saifedean Ammous, “Money,” in Principles of Economics (The Saif House, 2023), 181–203.

[2] Louis C. West, Gold and Silver Coin Standards in the Roman Empire, Numismatic Notes and Monographs (American Numismatic Society, 1941).

[3] James Ross and Leigh Bettenay, “Gold and Silver: Relative Values in the Ancient Past,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 34, no. 3 (August 2024): 403–20.

[4] “The Rise of the Gold Standard, 1660–1819,” in The Monetary History of Gold: A Documentary History, 1660–1999, 1st ed., ed. Mark Duckenfield (Routledge, 2004), 93–96.

[5] Henry Parker Willis, A History of the Latin Monetary Union: A Study of International Monetary Action (University of Chicago Press, 1901), 266.

[6] Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (1934; Yale University Press, 1953), 9–21.

[7] Lawrence Officer, “Gold Standard,” in EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples, March 26, 2008.