then of the gold standard and then you know as you know since nine hundred seventy one even the bretton woodsystem which was the last of link to gold we and one of the reasons was that each government wanted to have their own printing press their own money and of course for the purpose of manipulating it. absolutely right the u.s. government is also a currency manipulator to try to get their currency down and they are furious with the chinese because they pick their currency to the dollar not allowing it to devalue but you see that this is why i think we have now among these few currencies sort of an implicit race to the bottom and we see one ever country you mentioned switzerland but of a country like switzerland run more conservative monetary policy as the swiss have for some time this mess of pressure for that country obviously to see its currency appreciate the internal political pressures from the export industry and so forth and we've seen that last year now that the that the swiss government is taking all these measures on the central bank to weaken their currency or not even introduci

then you have the gold exchange standard of the 1920s and lately, more recently, bretton woods. and each of those systems seem to have its flaws, each seem to break down. and the so-called classical gold standard i think lasted, what, 39 years, from the 1870s just up to the first world war. so actually had a very brief period perhaps coincident with british imperial hi gem ne. >> there was that, was there? >> briefly. what do you make of this, the fact that the gold standard is always morphing, always in a way failing from one incarnation to another? >> may i begin just by saying i often thought of the keynesians as the marxists of today. you're scandalizing me. let's just use a couple of concrete examples to begin a brief answer. sir isaac newton established the basis of the english pound sterling in 1717, the very same isaac newton who pioneered the scientific revolution of the 17th and early 18th century. the weight unit which was established by law of the english pound in gold lasted until 1914. so, with all respect for edwards' dating, we had a 200-year constant unit of val

the dollar i mean is it slowly eroding people we've talked about for years about the end of the bretton woods agreement i mean you know where is the dollar going is that just slowly slipping away. i think that's a better characterization since we're supposed to be debating that than martins' slowly the trading doesn't really matter that much to me because the un is dead as a global currency it's since it's been undervalued we haven't seen that the want of course has potential as a global currency but the lack of nerve in beijing is holding that back and the u.s. is doing its best to undermine the dollar but at the same time everybody else is currencies are so weak or stunted that we see any as again in the euro crisis money flowing into dollar holdings so american policy i think martin and i certainly agree on that is damaging to the dollar but i think the decline is very slow because everything is relative it's not just your currency it's how your currency looks against other currencies and in that sense the dollar's doing ok i mean what do you think about that market is there none of the cu

at how the gold standard work you know britain could not be manipulated and to its own ends the bretton woodsystem is very different because now off the second world war america was under control so if we go back to a global one global currency i would argue strongly it would have to be something that is not under the control of any of these governments and it would have to be completely a political and again i would see you know a gold standard would actually work i do think we could go back to some kind of gold standard but i think my concern is that the politicians don't want to give you know this up now this ability to manipulate their currencies to set interest rates to stimulate the economy artificially in my view by printing lots of money injecting bank reserves whenever they want into the banking system well i mean let me put on my barack obama hat for a second and say that it's not about going back to the gold standard it's about going to the future of the gold standard you say therefore it's palpable you know go to the future hope change gold standard well up you've got it figured o