Not gonna happen. There isn’t enough gold in the world to back what the US alone has in cash floating around.
Depends on where you set the price of gold.
At ten million dollars an ounce there is. It depends on how much inflation one can tolerate.
I'd agree that it's not going to happen, but for other reasons.
The main (and sufficient) reason is that nobody among leaders of governments that matter wants the gold standard. They benefit from fiat monies that they print themselves. They can't print gold. As the US dollar crumbles, the second-tier currencies are waiting in the wings to be picked for "currency baskets," global or regional.
With regard to the "not enough gold to back debts that had been made." Several processes will follow. First, it is possible and natural for the price of gold to increase a hundredfold to match those debts. But then there will be a huge incentive to mine gold from sources that today are not economically viable. There is still plenty of gold in California; there is a huge amount of gold in ocean water; there are many other locations where gold is present but mining it today is too expensive. As result, the volume of gold on the market will be increasing, and after a few years (5 to 10) the gold price will start dropping slightly. Still, it will be in the ionosphere and above, compared to what we have today.
But if the price of gold is allowed to rise (unavoidably, if the gold standard is returned to) then industrial uses of gold will be curtailed. And that would mean that electronic products will become unaffordable for yet another reason. Practically all ICs contain gold - it is used to connect the die (the silicon crystal) to the pads of the package. It's not much - micrograms - but there are many of those ICs in each computer, and there are many computers around, and telephones, and other essential stuff.
At this day the price of gold is close to the cost of mining the gold, as it is set automatically by the market. Speculation affects the price somewhat, but still it matches (in the order of magnitude) the labor that goes into mining it. Gold is relatively scarce, and it is an important metal in the industry. We don't really want to rock that boat.
The desire for gold standard (or any other precious metal standard) is coming from the fact that those metals are hard to mine, and the supply therefore is limited. Inflation under the gold standard is small; but it still exists because the volume of gold in circulation is growing as more gold is mined. Very little gold is "destroyed," though some is lost through scrap of products that contain too little gold to bother recovering, and through wear of jewelry.
The gold serves as a physical barrier to infinite printing of money. But there are other methods to achieve the same. We already know of the Bitcoin. It is a fraud, as it is implemented, but the idea makes sense. You can today create a math-based currency that can't be forged. For example, just "print" a billion of numbers, from 0 to 109-1. Replace USD with those, in whatever ratio. If you want to pay, just transfer one of your individually numbered credit "bills" to the other guy. Now he has them, and you don't. Ownership can be traced by a number of methods that I won't be mentioning here for brevity.
To summarize, it would be ill-advised to use gold as money today, and it is relatively easy to introduce a currency (country-specific or global) that is unforgeable and unemittable (or emittable at a certain rate.) All it takes is good people in political offices. But you already see where the catch is.
I've seen estimates that a gold price of $7500/oz. would be the magic number. We may be there before long.
Yeah there is no way they could adjust the price of gold (say 25,000 an ounce for example) to meet with the money supply I mean that is just impossible!
What an idiotic thing to write. The free-market clearing price for gold is $1,876 per ounce. Yes, that indicates massive inflation since we left the gold standard and gold was $32 /oz. But there's a price for everything. There is a price for gold that would make the gold standard work again. Seemingly, though, there isn't the political will to keep that price stable. That's why the gold standard is a non-starter in today's environment.
Sure there is. It’s just that to do it the price of gold will ha e to be 20000 an ounce....