intrinsic value and over these 41 years our banks have become ever wobblier on the authority of ben espernot, phd, a dozen major financial institutions were at death's door in 2008. in that our great recession, the u.s. economy shrank by a few percentage points only, yet no major bank failed in the ugly depression of 1920, '21, and no major bank failed in the still you go ier depression of 1929, '33. between 1929 and 1933, the economy was virtually sawed in half. imagine what wreckage that would do today in our subsidized and cartelized financial system. today's bankers, i suppose, are no less capable than their forbearers. what accounts, then, for the accident proneness for the 21st century financial system? in my opinion, what accounts for it is the incentives we have put in place in paper money, in the socialization of financial risk, and in the doctrine of too big to fail, we have hit the trifecta of incentives to failure. part and parcel to the gold standard was a system of banking and the salient feature of that system was solvency. in a gold standard checking accounts, as lew mentione