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But the great majority of the world's economists strongly oppose both the gold standard and a price hike. Says a top U.S. Treasury officer: "The full gold standard is oldfashioned, impracticable, a discipline enforced with the lash. The world has moved on without it." In place of that rigid discipline, nations have built up flexible disciplines better suited to control the ups and downs of the complex modern world, such as the International Monetary Fund. Opponents of return to the standard of a quarter of a century ago insist that the U.S. is already as near to a gold standard as necessary, since gold still backs up its currency, and its dollar can be converted into gold by foreign governments and central banks.
Nor do most economists see any reason for making a price hike now. The British Radcliffe Report on monetary policy this year concluded that such an increase is not "immediately necessary or the most hopeful approach to the problem of international liquidity," and the International Monetary Fund has come out against it. Gold-short nations that need the most help would benefit least by the change; the major gains would be made by such big gold producers as Russia and South Africa.
Economists still believe firmly in gold's prime importance as the ultimate financial standard. They consider it psychologically vital to fiscal confidence, useful as a long-term guarantee that countries can meet their bills. But they have long since ceased to regard it as the sole test of a currency's stability. More important in today's world is the health of a nation's economy, the real rise in its national income, the strength of its built-in fiscal controls. Most nations now have learned the heavy price of unsound financial and fiscal policies; they no longer need the lash of gold.