If someone - Ron Paul for instance - had said two years ago that a return to the gold standard was inevitable, he would have been laughed off the stage.Ron Paul nearly was.But no one could have possibly predicted the recklessness of the Fed under Ben Bernanke with his irresponsible "qualitative easing" strategies that have pumped trillions of fiat dollars into the financial system in order to prop up the US economy.John Hathaway at Bloomberg: The breakdown of the monetary system will be chaotic. When inflation commences, it will be highly disruptive. The damage to fixed-income assets will seem instantaneous. Foreign-exchange markets will become dysfunctional. The economy will become even more fragile and unpredictable.Gold is an imperfect, but comparatively reliable, market gauge for the extent of current and future monetary destruction. The recent acceleration in the dollar price of the metal to $1,381, a record high in nominal terms, coincided with talk of a new round of...(Read Full Post)