It didn’t work well at all. We had frequent economic panics all through the 1800s and early 1900s. When the US rose to power (1930s to 1940s) gold was mostly n

It didn’t work well at all. We had frequent economic panics all through the 1800s and early 1900s. When the US rose to power (1930s to 1940s) gold was mostly not used in practice due to international traffic being mostly blocked (due to nationalist impulses during the Depression) or under heavy credit (during WW2). There’s a decent argument to be made gold caused the Great Depression or at least exacerbated it. The “gold standard” system that started under Breton Woods (1944-1971) was basically a polite fiction, and when someone called the fiction it died. A gold standard would be totally unworkable for today’s trade. It barely served the fledgling globalism of the 1920s.