Most gold mines are outside the US. So as an American, no thanks. We could just stop printing dollars.
"If we just froze the monetary base tomorrow then inflation would way undershoot expectations, we'd almost certainly get falling aggregate demand and the price level would subsequently fall. A whole bunch of debt contracts that were made with particular inflation expectations in mind would default, likely triggering a recession, and a lot of the Fed's monetary policy tools that depend on being able to manipulate the monetary base wouldn't be available (since the base is frozen), so the recession would likely descend into a depression.
In other words, the classic debt deflation spiral.
If the change was communicated a long time ahead of time and the transition was done extremely gradually (lowering the inflation target YoY over the course of a decade or two, adjusting the monetary base growth rate as appropriate) until the M0 growth rate hit zero....might not be too terrible. It's still an extreme change in monetary policy regime and it's difficult to impossible to really predict accurately what the economy would look like on the other side, but it might be pretty OK.
A frozen fiat monetary base sometimes gets called a synthetic commodity money, so it might generate most of the positives of a gold standard (predictable long term price level, productivity based price deflation, stable NGDP growth rate [ie. ~0%], etc) without the downsides (money supply shocks related to changes in the supply of gold, artificially hiking the price of industrial gold, the monetary apocalypse that is one day being able to sustainability mine the unfathomable amounts of gold in the asteroid belt, etc).
The problem you're going to really run into is that it's really uncharted territory. There was no clear understanding of monetary economics and macro-economic management in the 19th and early 20th centuries when relatively-fixed monetary bases (ie. the gold standard) were more common. What understanding there was was often actively harmful (real-bills doctrine, for example). Macroeconomic management, economic stability policy, and all those things that keep the economy afloat today are based on assumptions of mildly inflationary economic environments where control of the monetary base is the primary start of any transmission path for monetary policy. If you take that away, it's harder to see how central banks and other authorities could respond to recessions in an effective way.
So yeah, it's definitely possible it could be OK, but it's also possible it could go terribly, terribly wrong and we would be hamstringing out ability to respond in the case it did."
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