Richard Grossman has an interesting op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times on why the US should not return to the gold standard - click here. The Free Exchange blog at the Economist also has a post on the gold standard. I have recently been examining the financial crises which occurred in the UK in 1837, 1857, 1857 and 1866 for my new book. On each occasion, whenever one of these financial crises occurred, the Bank of England had to increase its interest rate (known as the bank rate), sometimes as high as 10%. Why did they do this in the middle of a crisis? Shouldn't interest rates be cut in a crisis? The answer is simple: the gold standard meant that the Bank had to increase its interest rate to prevent gold draining from it and the country.
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.