I was at a conference today at George Washington University on liberal learning in undergraduate business education, and Bernanke kicked us out of his room so he could kill the gold standard people….

“Unfortunately, gold standards are far from perfect monetary systems,” Bernanke said. “There’s an awful big waste of resources.”  Plus, he said, they don’t fix things.  There wouldn’t be enough gold in the world to meet global demand, the U.S. would need to mine in South Africa and ship what it could get to a vault in New York City — and most importantly, the Fed would be left unable to respond to rising levels of unemployment.  Pegging the value of dollar to gold led to financial panics and sharp swings in the economy during the 19th Century, he continued, the kinds of problems the Fed was established in 1913 to stop.  “The gold standard would not be feasible for both practical reasons and policy reasons,” Bernanke said. “I understand the impulse, but I think if you look at actual history the gold standard didn’t work well.”