Stability of gold standard and its selected consequences: A reply to prof. Howden

Abstract

Since I am naturally biased in favor of the gold standard, I was glad when I found that Prof. Howden (2008) exerted effort to uproot the thesis presented in my paper «Stability of Gold

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Standard and Its Selected Consequences» (Kvasnicka, 2007) that the price level could be very unstable under the gold standard if the overall monetary stock of gold is relatively small, and one of its consequences, that this instability makes an independent restitution of the gold standard in a small country unlikely. No one would be happier than me if he succeeded. However, I will claim here that his critique failed. To show why, I will first summarize major points of my former paper and then comment on Prof. Howden’s critique. Since Prof. Howden concentrates only on the feasibility of the restitution of the gold standard in the present world, I will not defend all the propositions made in my former paper, but will confine myself to the question whether a small country adopting the gold standard independently in the present world would or would not suffer from the price level instability and trade cycles caused by such a gold standard.