With everyone on the gold standard being open to trade and financial flows, the promise of convertibility combined with the flexibility of prices and wages to act as the mechanism of adjustment to ensure that the global economy produced a balance between imports and exports in one country and a balance across the system of countries as a whole. This is how the gold standard created the conditions for the growth of trade across the world, free from government interference and the danger of inflation. It was self-regulating, automatic, and impersonal—which was precisely the problem the moment ordinary people got involved.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 491