> “Gold standard” is just shorthand for restrictive policies that favours creditors over debtors.
No, that’s not what the phrase normally means when taling about finance.
> But this is not the only way to do it, see IMF austerity rules.
Lots of things have been said, by lots of people, about IMF austerity rules, but calling them an implementation of the gold standard is…a new one.
> In that case you’re just treating foreign reserves as if they were metallic treasure.
There is certainly a sense in which an externally controlled currency is similar to any other commodity bases for money that isn’t a domestically controlled currency from the perspective of the local government, and particularly in terms of the limits on its fiscal policy, but to the extent that central managers manipulating supply artificially creates business cycles that do not exist with a natural resource-based commodity currency like gold (a contention which, again, is false anyhow, but is the argument that was being made upthread about the gold standard) you’d expect that to be as true in foreign countries dependent on the currency as in the country that is managing it.