While I'm not up on all or even much of the theory about this, it seems to me that the amount of gold reserves doesn't really matter. The utility of a gold sta

While I'm not up on all or even much of the theory about this, it seems to me that the amount of gold reserves doesn't really matter. The utility of a gold standard is that the government has to redeem your paper dollars at, say, $20.67 to the troy ounce, until it doesn't, and, oh, confiscates all the nation's gold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102). So you have a great degree of stability until you don't, and you know exactly when the game is officially up and the economy is running under new rules, particularly political ones at that. History suggests this pretty much always happens, sooner or later when a government gets desperate enough. Maybe not as severe as our New Deal, but e.g. the Swiss franc underwent a series of devaluations until a referendum took the country entirely off the gold standard in 2000.