Could gold once again be our guide?

``Gold didn’t fail the central banks, Dr. Mundell says – central banks failed gold. They mismanaged it, going off gold, then going back on, then going off again – arbitrarily setting its price rather than permitting the markets to set it. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in 1999, he asserted that the Fed – “the greatest agent for inflation ever created” – had bungled monetary policy so badly that it was necessarily “implicated” in the darkest moments of the 20th century: the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War. By this standard, a little guidance now from gold couldn’t hurt. ''