Through a long process of trial and error, people around the world found that gold could serve best as the anchor relative to which everything was priced. Gold became such a rock, serving the custom of anchoring the price system. Bankers, central or private, do not have to guess growth, do not have to know what is velocity, and do not have to forecast what will happen to millions of variables in the domestic or international economy when shaping monetary policy. They have an automatic stabilizer providing a clear signal what is happening to liquidity in the economy. When people show up at the bank and want to exchange currency for gold, it's done, diminishing liquidity.
Nobody is interested in pricing and valuating in unreliable peso terms.
In contrast, Brazil is doing now the opposite, giving a clear signal to investors that it intends to maintain the link between the real and the dollar. He made this statement following comments by Robert Roosa, once the Treasury Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs in the Kennedy administration. The latter argued that the U.S. gold stocks may not be sufficient to maintain the dollar's value. With an anchor in place, it does not matter if there are 1000 commodities in the economy or 1 million. Everything is priced relative to gold.