The latest figure to come out for a restoration of a role for gold in the international monetary system turns out to be none other than Mahathir Mohamad. He is the former prime minister of Malaysia who, after 22 years in office, bowed out with a diatribe against the Jews, whom he accused of running the world. That was in 2003. No doubt he was still smarting six years after the dressing down he’d received for his rant, made in 1997 at the meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Hong Kong, against currency traders. His rebuke came from George Soros, who’d been betting against the ringgit. Let us just say that in respect of the Jews, Dr. Mahathir makes Ron Paul look like the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

It turns out that complaints about the Jews were absent from Dr. Mahathir’s latest demarche, which appeared as an op-ed piece in the Financial Times. One can but guess whether he restrained himself or the FT edited the piece as a courtesy to the rest of us. But whichever, we’re in a mood to call it progress. It’s nice to see Dr. Mahathir focusing on the actual culprit. It never was, of course, Jews who caused the problem. Or Americans. Or “currency traders.” Or Europeans. It is fiat money. Dr. Mahathir’s new presecription turns out to be the same as that of Charles DeGaulle, who, when he had a similar epiphany to that which seems to have struck Dr. Mahathir, assembled 1,000 newspapermen in the Elysee Palace and gave them a lecture on political economy.

We wonder how Dr. Mahathir’s demarche is going to go down with Paul Krugman. One of the things Mr. Krugman became famous for was a defense of the use of capital controls in Malaysia that, by his own account, became known as the “Krugman-Mahathir strategy.” Later, in his New York Times column he emerged as one of the few apologists for Mahathir, most notably after the Malaysian leader delivered, in 2003, his notorious diatribe at the meeting in Kuala Lumpur of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Mr. Krugman, in a column headlined “Listening to Mahathir,” did condemn the anti-Semitic part of the prime minister’s rant,* though he put the gloss on it with the sub-headline “Anti-Semitism with a purpose.” Maybe Dr. Mahathir’s endorsement of a gold-linked currency will be just too much for Mr. Krugman.

For our part, we remark on all this merely by way of covering the expanding list of those who are waking up to the understanding that our current crisis is linked to fiat money. The FT op-ed page has brought in Robert Zoellick, who declared for a role for gold in November of 2010, and earlier this week its star foreign affairs columnist, Gideon Rachman, who confessed he was feeling “strangely Austrian,” a reference to the school of economics that favors gold. Now Dr. Mahathir. Meantime, everyone from the Nobel Laureate Robert Mundell of Columbia to the celebrated chronicler of Mr. Market, James Grant, has weighed in. The Republican candidates have followed, to one degree or another, by adding sound money to their platforms (Governor Romney has said he would not reappoint Governor Bernanke as the Fed chairman). Ron Paul no doubt savors President Reagan’s aphorism about how there’s no limit to what can be accomplished if one doesn’t worry about who gets the credit.

_________

* The blame for all the hostility, Mr. Krugman said, lay with George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon.