Matt Yglesias posts an email from a reader pointing out that Ron Paul's obsession with gold-backed currency was a sure indicator of conspiracist nut-jobbery, long before the newsletters came to light. Matt asks how the gold standard went from being conventional wisdom to a fringe lunacy.
Good question! The Bretton Woods system, the international monetary regime set up after World War II, began as a means of stabilizing the global economy by pegging all currencies against the dollar and preserving dollar convertability to gold. Over time, Bretton Woods evolved into an increasingly non-fixed system of exchange, and by the time it was dismantled, the last vestiges of the gold standard were known as "paper gold."
At the same time, Bretton Woods involved every hobgoblin that keeps the paranoid up at night — a secretive monied elite, wide-ranging international institutions, homosexual and Jewish financiers, etc. So when Bretton Woods turns out to be the key transition from fixed to floating currency, what's someone who knows the truth about the new world order to do, but stock up on gold bullion and guns and head out to Montana.
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