Paper Money Versus The Gold Standard

But it less well known is that in the years after Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, he had second thoughts about this monetary prescription. In a 1986 article on, “The Resource Costs of Irredeemable Paper Money,” he argued that when looking over the monetary mismanagement and mischief caused by governments and central banks during the twentieth century, it was “crystal clear” that the costs of mining, minting and storing gold as the basis of a monetary system would have been far less than the disruptive and destabilizing costs imposed on society due to paper money inflations and the booms and busts of the business cycle brought about by central bank manipulations of money and interest rates.

Paper Money Versus The Gold Standard