No. The war made European economies in general unstable because of the destruction, the taxation, the debts, etc. Those who wanted to be able to print money at will scapegoated gold, but there was nothing wrong with gold. The fact that the US had a concentration of gold simply meant the the US would be buying a lot of goods from Europe, which would have been a good thing for the European economies.
Some economists correctly predicted that return to the gold standard after WWI would cause a deflation.
In the first place there is nothing wrong with deflation per se. In peacetime it just means the economy is getting more efficient so everyone's savings are increasing in value. This author name drops von Mises and he's right about von Mises' prediction. What he doesn't tell us is that von Mises had nothing against deflation.
In the second place any excessive deflation was caused by the the war, not by gold. Going off the gold standard didn't relieve the effect of the war but it did transfer the worst economic effects of the war from the well connected to the general public.
Had the price of gold been raised in the late 1920's, or had the major central banks pursued policies of price stability instead of adhering to the gold standard, there would have been no Great Depression, no Nazi revolution and no World War II.
Where to begin... The Nazi phenomena was a result of the unfair Versailles treaty. It had nothing to do with the gold standard and the suggestion is just stupid.
The central banks were never on a pure gold standard to begin with. Every country practiced fractional reserve banking and most central banks did follow a policy of price stability (though not Germany of course). The Fed printed money all through the twenties. It was precisely those policies that caused the inefficiencies that led to the depression.
Never forget that the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics is awarded by a central bank.
Also never forget that most economists get their paychecks from a government.
I'm not certain that a more merciful Versailles Treaty could have stopped the rise of German National Socialism. Nationalism and eugenics was the coin of the realm in European intellectual circles (and Germany had some of the most cutting-edge scientific academies). Socialism was the by-word of European economics. Yes, there's "the butterfly effect" and all that, but we'll never know exactly *how* things would have been different if we'd take a particular right fork instead of the left.
Some economists correctly predicted that return to the gold standard after WWI would cause a deflation.
In the first place there is nothing wrong with deflation per se. In peacetime it just means the economy is getting more efficient so everyone’s savings are increasing in value. This author name drops von Mises and he’s right about von Mises’ prediction. What he doesn’t tell us is that von Mises had nothing against deflation.
In the second place any excessive deflation was caused by the the war, not by gold. Going off the gold standard didn’t relieve the effect of the war but it did transfer the worst economic effects of the war from the well connected to the general public.
Churchill’s decision as Chancellor of the Exchequer to return post World War I Britain to the Gold Standard based on the pound-gold value before the WWI was a disaster for Britain. Even Churchill admitted it was the biggest mistake of his life. British industries found themselves at a huge competitive disadvantage due to the overvalued pound and the necessary high interest rates to maintain the reinstated gold standard. British industries reacted by trying to impose wage cuts and longer hours on workers. The end result was the Miners and General Strike of 1926
The same conditions pertained after WWII, but the US tried something different then, and instituted the Marshall Plan to get Europe's economy going again. Had the US done that after WWI, and forgiven British/French debt and shipped back the gold they had sold off - simultaneously requiring the forgiveness of the German reparations "debt" - Europe would have been in a condition to recover stably.
But presumably that would have required more magnanimity than the Americans were feeling at the time . . . The trouble is that that is a second guess, based on how bad things actually went after WWI the way the money standard was in fact done.