Around that time Hunter S. Thompson was writing for a magazine and had just attended an oil industry conference where the attendees were terrified that the United States was about to experience an "oil peak" for domestic production.
His editor killed the story because it seemed too alarmist.
We know the story now that the whole world economy was reorganized around this event
I had no idea gold-backed currencies were actually forbidden. Seems suspicious - why should the IMF use its vast influence to prevent countries from trying out gold-backed currency? Can such attempts somehow unfairly damage other currencies?
Certainly before the managed Bretton Woods standard the US economy had "the panic of XXXX" every few years. Price stability might have been better but unemployment, investment, and everything else was unsteady.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
The "goldfinger scenario" that goldbugs dream of is the collapse of the global economy which is orders of magnitude too big to be served by the amount of gold we have, they hope that they'll get to live like French aristocrats before the revolution.
This seems very misleading. It wasn't unthinkable in 1969, when the gold standard was still in place.
> they hope that they'll get to live like French aristocrats before the revolution.
While not a goldbug myself, ascribing base motivations to adherents of some idea is a poor substitute for an argument against the idea itself.
(I have actually no idea what happened in between)
No, in fact a gold standard is so terrible it can't compete against fiat.