> except if you read the * and footnote

…it says:

> These restrictions on gold exports continued until June 1919, at which point we returned to the full gold standard. I have started from this last date, because there is no question that we were operating under the gold standard at this point.

So the gyrations were occurring when the gold standard was full-on.

See also:

* https://www.vox.com/2014/7/16/5900297/case-against-gold-stan...

> However the chart is old and doesn’t include the recent CPI readings of 6.4% and 6.8% annualized inflation that were reported in the most recent 2 months by the BLS.

The chart is "old" because the article was written in 2012. It was written during a period when QE was going on and there was much tearing of garments about 'money printing':

> We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment.

* https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.ht...

And for the next decade the CPI was doing not a whole lot. So much for Friedman's "always a monetary phenomenon"—which he was wrong about even in the 1980s when Volcker was doing his thing.

Further a spike in inflation was expected and predicted, and that a number of folks said it could last a year, like happened during the Korean War:

* https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/in...

In the fact last month's numbers were not surprising because of their value, but because they so closely matched predictions:

> The consumer price index increased 0.8% last month, the government said Friday. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast a 0.7% advance.

* https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coming-up-u-s-consumer-pri...

* https://www.reuters.com/business/biden-says-inflation-data-d...

> you will see it discloses that the US actually went off the gold standard

Being "on" the gold standard will take as much political will as not printing money. Probably more, because of the economic suffering that deflation causes… as was seen Greece in the 2010s (Gold Dawn), and Japan and Germany in the late 1930s.

> I don’t buy your argument that allowing a handful of central bankers to manipulate the money supply and print money out of thin air, is a good thing.

Not being able to print money when it is needed in the economy can cause depressions:

* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-an...

And the folks who like the gold standard tend to also like balanced budgets and austerity, which is another bad idea:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...

It should be noted that historically 'printing money' has mostly not the cause of (hyper)inflation, but rather printing money was the effect of something else:

* https://clintballinger.com/2021/01/12/the-myth-of-hyperinfla...

> In this paper I will argue why the common misconception that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” cannot be used to explain most historical hyperinflations. I will argue that “money printing” is often the response to exogenous and unusual events and not the direct cause of the hyperinflation.

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102

Further, "printing money" isn't what people think it is:

> This paper provides a general understanding of the workings of the modern fiat monetary system in the United States within the context of the global economy. The work is primarily descriptive in nature and takes an operational perspective of the monetary system using the understandings of Monetary Realism.

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625

If anyone is still thinking about bank reserves and multipliers then they are severely out of date. Tobin described this as the "Old View" in 1963:

* https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d01/d0...