I am in favor of a single, worldwide money. It's called "gold."
Remember the guy who ran for governor of New York as the candidate of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party? We need a new one, called the Money Is Too Damn Tight Party. It would get my vote.
But the vote it needs belongs to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and he isn't giving it. On Wednesday, the Fed indicated it would stick to its current course, declining to embark on another "quantitative easing" that would inject a lot more money into the economy.
He and many other people have awful memories of high inflation from the late 1970s and early 1980s....
reserves, to cover it.
In the case of the Depression, private ownership of gold was outlawed by Imperial Decree on the part of FDR, in 1933. The quantity of gold at that point was irrelevant.
However, had we stayed on a precious metals standard at that point, and not tried to spend ourselves rich through government alphabet soup programs, we would have been out of the Great Depression in a year. Instead, we floundered along in a depression until, arguably, the late 1940's.