This is in practice impossible because value hand-off is not instantaneous. Someone is always at risk in a transaction, to a varying degree over time. (To say nothing of the productivity gained from the friction reduction of transaction credit.)
In Malthusian terms, every child is born with future claims on unproduced food. Mandating that be settled up front requires dark decisions, ones starving cities and families have had to make.
There was, AFAIK, no time in history in which a monometallic gold standard with no fractional reserve banking was the international norm, certainly no time overlapping with the capitalist econonic system and industrialization. The US before 1870 was primarily on a silver standard—and that’s true of most ofnthe West for quite some time before the US existed, and fractional reserve (or no-required-reserve) banking was the norm in the US before the gold standard, too. The gold standard was only 1870-1932, and none of that time was there no fractional reserve banking.
I do think in general popular economics (aka LinkedIn blogs) tend to overstate the benefits of gold.
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.