I know there is this myth of the "no crisis ever during the gold standard era", but this is false. We had a crisis every ten years or so, sometime way bigger than the 2008 crisis despite the economies being less interconnected. And those crisis sometimes were entirely disconnected from production issues, unlike 2008 that is clearly linked with the conventional oil/gas peak. Because having liquidity that allow easy trading of ressources actually help recover faster and avoid made up crisis like the 1893 one in the US.

Governments have been fiddling with metal-based currencies going back to Ancient Rome and Han China:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

Never mind what the general public has done as well:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_coin_debasement#Coi...

See Bernstein.

> With simulated pieces of green paper, you can just type some numbers into a computer and suddenly there are twice as many of them as there were before. Or a hundred times as many. Or a trillion times as many...

Yup, and that's how private banks create loans and mortgages:

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

Central banks do not create the money that the public uses in the economy, and the only money that the government creates is coins and bills via the their mints.

Also, have you ever asked what happens when there isn't enough money?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Slump_(15th_century)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine

* http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11482

And it's not like 'hard money' brings any more stability:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...

* https://archive.ph/FWKcL