Donald Trump opened and closed his 2025 inaugural address with a promise to restore the golden age of America. The classical gold standard, and only the classical gold standard, would pave America's yellow brick road to making workers prosper again.
On Day One, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled America First Trade Policy. Long overdue.
Yet as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe observed, “God is in the details.” So, let’s get the details right.
The officials to whom the president delegated this:
The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Trade Representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures, such as a global supplemental tariff or other policies, to remedy such deficits.
Highly capable men but no Donald Trumps.
The classical gold standard is the only proven way to end the trade deficit and restore American equitable prosperity. Fast.
Trump senses this.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows definitively that when we abandoned gold it let the evil djinn of the merchandise trade deficit escape its golden bottle. Wages stagnated.
President Lyndon Johnson de facto abdicated, then Richard Nixon formally shut down, the postwar gold standard, as clearly shown by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s graph showing U.S. Gold Reserves and U.S. Trade Balance, which may be found here.
The accompanying article states:
"Ultimately, adhering to the gold standard prevents large gyrations in a nation’s balance of payments," Wen and Reinbold wrote. "In addition, fixed exchange rates make the cost of foreign goods more predictable, which can facilitate international trade."
Overall, the authors determined, the gold standard functioned well during this period, and the industrialized world experienced unprecedented peace, economic growth and stability, and trade openness.
The abdication of gold caused a slow-motion train wreck for American workers.
This is vividly illustrated by the Economic Policy Institute’s graph of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis data illustrating the disconnect between productivity and typical workers’ compensation, 1948-2013.
Gold is anathema to conventional thinkers, including the macroeconomists upon whom officialdom relies. Yet as iconic/iconoclastic economist Reuven Brenner recently observed, “In many ways, the entire ‘macroeconomic sector’ is comparable to the astrology that guided people’s decisions centuries ago.”
Mr. President? Make Uncle Sam’s economists stop crucifying mankind upon a cross of superstition.
Trump should follow his own very good brain on this and tell his Cabinet to go for the gold. Gold is a prosperity mulligan.
Trump might do well to place his own presidential-freedom-medal recipient Dr. Arthur Laffer in charge of this process. Laffer gets gold.
Laffer, if he dusts off the Reagan Gold Commissioner Lewis Lehrman-authored Gold Standard Act of 1984, can prepare the package needed to stop inflation in its tracks and put us workers back on the road to prosperity ... in weeks.
Perhaps days.
Maybe hours.
Trump uniquely, among elected officials, gets the power of gold to cure inflation and foster equitable prosperity. No sign that his Cabinet does.
Gold is key to giving America the golden age you have promised. You get it.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 race spoke twice glowingly of the gold standard:
- "We used to have a very, very solid country because it was based on a gold standard," Trump told WMUR television in New Hampshire in March 2016. … But he said it would be tough to bring it back because "we don't have the gold. Other places have the gold."
- Trump commented to GQ: "Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy, would it be wonderful. We'd have a standard on which to base our money."
As I have previously observed, Trump was misadvised. America has the gold.
Restoring the gold standard, rightly done? Easy as pie.
Keynes, in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace, wrote: “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
On this issue, Donald Trump is that “one man in a million.”
Don’t delegate this one, Mr. President.
Trump instinctively grasps gold. His Cabinet officials, who inevitably will rely on conventional macroeconomists, will propose various Rube Goldberg policy contraptions that never worked in practice. They never will.
Donald Trump opened and closed his 2025 inaugural address with a promise to restore the golden age of America. Pave us a yellow brick road to make American workers prosper again.
Mr. President? Go for the gold!
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 199,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.