Fed? Those who parrot that a gold standard "does not work" can never explain how the Fed Standard is working better. They prefer simply to avoid the question of performance. In response to "wildcat banking" -- you illicitly conflate the non-Federally-chartered banking period pre-1863 with the effectively free banking that prevailed afterwards. Quoting the wikipedia entry on "Wildcat banking": Work done by Hugh Rockoff, Arthur Rolnick, and Warren Weber, have shown a greater success rate among state banks than previously thought. Though some states produced bad bank notes, generally State regulated banks produced reliable notes that could be expected to trade near par. In addition I would add that until the mid-20th century the states had unit banking laws that kept banks local and undiversified, which did not help matters of stability. Of course state-only banks pre-1863 would be subject to the same problems. Yet somehow amongst all this anarchy bank failures didn't matter (the economy still progressed and the currency got stronger), perhaps because of the presence of a national gold and silver backed currency. Still, I would say stability for its own sake is not good: you should always have to do diligence on any financial custodian. More banks probably need to fail today, but apparently failure is not an option in today's version of capitalism. The highest level of bank failures we ever had was in the 1980-early 90s period, incidentally. Good work on the part of the inflationary, fiat system! I believe you are misrepresenting my