The money supply increases naturally by exactly the amount of increases in productivity in a healthy economy, notes Stansberry & Associates Investment Research Founder Porter Stansberry. He doesn't have to point out that the economy isn't healthy, nor that the money supply expands every time the printing presses run to bail out a failing business and bring on a new iteration of quantitative easing. The solution is a simple (albeit not necessarily easy) one, Porter tells us in this exclusive Gold Report interview: Return to the gold standard. That will happen, he says, when the people say, "Enough!"

The Gold Report: You've written a lot about the gold standard recently, and an article in your S&A Digest argues that we should greatly prefer gold-backed money because it would limit the ability to increase the money supply. It goes on to point out that increasing the money supply essentially causes inflation. If regulations prohibited governments from expanding the money supply, would fiat currency be as good as the gold standard?

Porter Stansberry: In theory, it could be, but in practice that's never happened. I suspect that the market wouldn't have much faith in such rules, and they'd be abused eventually. During the Volcker and Greenspan Federal Reserve periods, from roughly 1981– 2006, two central bankers created a de facto gold standard because they remained relatively consistent vis-à-vis money supply targets.

Volcker absolutely targeted money supply, as did Greenspan up until about 1999. He moved away from that stance due to Y2K fears and then the 2001–2002 recession. So we've seen long periods in fiat systems where money supply growth was targeted and fairly reliable.

The problem, of course, is that the gold-standard rules don't apply across the banking systems. When the Fed was targeting money supply, bankers lobbied for all kinds of changes related to reserve ratios, which allowed them to massively increase the leverage on their balance sheets. Famously, the investment banks—Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and others—went from, say, 15:1 to 50:1. That had a tremendous impact on the amount of credit in the economy, which ultimately led to the collapse we well remember. Then the Fed started to radically increase the money supply to help reduce the impact of those bad loans.

That's a long way of saying that efforts to mirror a gold standard by rule have never been effectual in history, and they haven't worked in America over the past 40 years.

TGR: So changing the reserve requirements, in essence, increased the money supply.

PS: Let's talk definitions. When I'm talking about the monetary base....