Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"I think it very much is a reasonable question. I think that we can say that the easy money policy of the Federal Reserve did help build up the excesses in the housing market, which led to the housing crash. Some say that a gold standard would have prevented those excesses because if your currency - the amount of your currency - is tied to how much gold you have, and if gold isn't increasing, that's going to limit how much money you can pump into the economy. Now, a couple of comments, though, about this. First of all, we can have a Federal Reserve and we can have a gold standard. We don't have to get rid of the Federal Reserve to have a gold standard. In fact, when the Federal Reserve started about 100 years ago, we were on a gold standard. Secondly, we should remember that other than the money supply, the Federal Reserve performs an important function as a backstop, as a rescuer, if you will, of troubled banks. I think we need to keep that in mind before we abolish the Federal Reserve. And then last point, the gold standard has problems of its own. Without going into a lot of detail, many very eminent economists - like Milton Friedman, the late Milton Friedman - said that the gold standard was actually a major contributor to the depth of the Great Depression. So I think this is an important debate. I think we should focus on what the Federal Reserve has done in the past, but we need to keep in mind the pluses and minuses of the Federal Reserve before we say, let's get rid of it."