IMF (surprisingly) allowed two economists to take a look at an alternative.
Chicago Plan Revisited, 2012
Doing a quick read: this appears to be the Gold Standard by another name.
Irving Fischer is associated with it, and Fischer was a mentor/inspiration to Milton Friedman, who, amongst other things, gave us:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to increase its profits and maximize returns to shareholders.[1] Friedman argues that the shareholders can then decide for themselves what social initiatives to take part in, rather than have an executive whom the shareholders appointed explicitly for business purposes decide such matters for them.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
You know, the philosophy that Boeing's management has been following the last decade or so.
The post that you are replying to wrote:
> The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money.
Under the ideology of Fischer and Friedman this is just fine. So I'm not sure putting forward an economic idea ("Chicago plan") by them would really help in preventing/reducing/rolling back 'Late Stage Capitalism' (or whatever) or accelerate its effects more. Probably the latter.
At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan:
(1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money.
(2) Complete elimination of bank runs.
(3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt.
(4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation.
We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.