Ben Bernanke Quotes
A gold standard doesn't imply stability in the prices of the goods and services that people buy every day, it implies a stability in the price of gold itself.
Bernanke, Ben S. The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis. Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 16.
This is the first major history of banks written in the United States.
What the Prime Minister was trying to say is that the buying power had not been diminished suddenly for local and non-imported items.
The assumption was that money would always be backed by gold or silver. In effect, raising or allaying the money was to change the amount of gold or silver that a particular denomination of money would be able to be exchanged for. This is one of the interesting proofs that these processes did nothing economically—for if they could, no one would want the money. This has always been a weakness or a strength—depending on one’s political point of view—of a gold standard.
President Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican did not agree with this view as it was he who led America to abandon the gold standard to back its money.
Ben Shalom Bernanke is an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served two terms as the 14th Chair of the Federal Reserve, from 2006 to 2014. During his tenure as chair, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year. Before becoming Federal Reserve chair, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave.
