Ralph Benko: The Death Certificate of the Paper Dollar

The dollar death certificate arrives in the mail this week. The Bank of England, "The Old Lady of Thread-needle Street" one of the most staid, cautious and dignified entities in the world of monetary policy, signals that the fiduciary currency standard ushered in on August 15, 1971 is, empirically measured, far inferior to the gold standard erected at Bretton Woods. Fellow Forbes.com columnist Charles Kadlec thoroughly reprises and analyzes the facts submitted to a candid world by the Bank of England in a paper to be officially published December 20, 2011. The Bank of England's Financial Stability Paper No.13. Reform of the international Monetary and Financial System, reported at Bloomberg BusinessWeek and reviewed here, is being seen by many monetary policy observers around the world as the "coroner's report on the death of the world dollar standard. What next? Presciently, at the watershed October 5-6 Heritage Foundation Conference on the Stable Dollar: Why we need it and How to Achieve it. Forbes' editor-in-chief Steve Forbes called for escalating the discourse from "whether" we should restore the gold standard to "how" to do so. The floodgates open.