The other day, a reader e-mailed me to ask for an explanation of the gold standard. He had heard it advocated in one of the political speeches.

Any responsible answer to his question would have taken more time than I could spare, but I looked through several introductory economics textbooks — including my own, "Basic Economics" — to try to find something that I could recommend that he read. Unfortunately, none of them covered the gold standard in any great detail. ...

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