A NEW GOLD STANDARD: Are Allen Greenspan, Steve Forbes, Ron Paul, Jim Grant, Robert Zoellick crazy fringe end-of-worlders?

We all know that the idea of the modern world returning to a Gold Standard is crazy, fringe, end-of-worlder, sit-in-your-bunker-with-guns-and-tinned-goods kind of stuff.

Here are some of the lunatic fringe who are advocating just such world policy:

Allan Greenspan 2011:

"We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it's usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity. There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.

Steve Forbes 2011:

A return to the gold standard by the United States within the next five years now seems likely, because that move would help the nation solve a variety of economic, fiscal, and monetary ills."

“What seems astonishing today could become conventional wisdom in a short period of time. Such a move would help to stabilize the value of the dollar, restore confidence among foreign investors in U.S. government bonds, and discourage reckless federal spending."

Ron Paul 2010:
Money comes out with real value. So over the many, many centuries, literally thousands of years, gold and silver has been used. And the founders understood this. They had runaway inflation. They explicitly said, "You can't emit bills of credit." And you want to restrain the authorities. So if you want to restrain government, you restrain the power to create money. And that's what gold does. A lot of people think, "Well, that means you're going to have to carry all that gold around in your pocket." No. There's nothing wrong with gold certificates. And it can be electronic gold. It's just that it restrains the power of individuals, especially secret individuals that have no oversight from Congress to create this money.

Jim Grant 2010:

“Well, in my mind (US) it will resolve them (our debt problems) necessarily by undertaking the step of restoring the dollar to convertibility into gold.

Robert Zoellick 2011:

Leading economies should consider adopting a modified global gold standard to guide currency rates, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said on Monday in a surprise proposal before a potentially acrimonious G20 summit.

Writing in the Financial Times, Zoellick called for a "Bretton Woods II" system of floating currencies as a successor to the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange rate regime that broke down in the early 1970s.

ALSO from ABC NEWS 2011:

In a move that reflects growing anxiety over rising inflation and a weak economy, South Carolina became the newest state to propose a bill that would make gold and silver coins a form of legal tender in the state.

Utah started the trend, becoming the first state on May 9 to recognize gold and silver coins minted by the U.S. government as legal tender. More than a dozen other states are considering similar moves.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE PRICE OF GOLD?

You can be sure that any type of gold standard - no matter how partial, how convertible, would require a price of gold several times what it is now.