[tylermagnan]

I’m trying to figure out what would happen if the US were to return to a gold standard on its own, while other nations continued to have floating fiat currencies. It sounds like the interwar period was a situation similar to this where international monetary policy was somewhat of a mess because most of Europe was broke from the war and had over inflated money. I’m guessing that this type of situation would result in large capital inflows to the US which would in turn be leant out to foreigners in both public and private debt. Is this correct, and what are the short term and long term implications of this? If you have any good references on this, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks,
Tyler

[jmherbener]

Ludwig von Mises addresses the theory of such a case in his book, Theory of Money and Credit:

http://library.mises.org/books/Ludwig%20von%20Mises/The%20Theory%20of%20Money%20and%20Credit.pdf

The discussion is in Part Four Monetary Reconstruction, Chapter 3 The Return to Sound Money. Mises discusses both the large country case and the small country case in which a country unilaterally returns to the gold standard while other countries do not.

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