So much for what we like to call the “verbal dollar.” Ben Bernanke, who as Federal Reserve chairman made verbosity a centerpiece of American monetary policy, is now telling central bank officials to “clam up.” That’s the headline the financial site MarketWatch put over a story about Mr. Bernanke’s complaints about the cacophony of comment from participants in key Fed meetings. It seems that nothing concentrates the mind of a central banker like America electing a president who says that a new gold standard would be “wonderful.”

Mr. Bernanke doesn’t come right out and concede that much. He made his comments on his Web log at Brookings. He put up the posting in advance of his appearance tomorrow on a panel at an event on Fed “communications” at the liberal think tank in Washington. There will apparently be discussion of a survey on the topic done by a Brookings unit. Mr. Bernanke says in his posting that the survey and a paper by one of his colleagues at the Fed take a “generally positive view” of the Fed’s communications practices.

By that he means communications that “aim to reflect the collective view of the Federal Open Market Committee, such as the post-meeting statement, the chair’s press conferences and testimonies, and the minutes.” The ex-colleague’s paper and the survey, Mr. Bernanke reckons, are not so hot on “‘decentralized’ communication of the views of individual FOMC participants, including speeches by governors and Reserve Bank presidents and the FOMC’s quarterly Summary of Economic Projections, which collects projections by individual participants of economic growth, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates.”

Nope, their yakking is “cacophonous,” which Google defines as “involving or producing a harsh, discordant mixture of sounds” and which The New York Sun defines as describing the inevitable result of fiat money. The optimistic view of the story is that Mr. Bernanke has discovered the principle of central banking enunciated at the hearing in London at which John Maynard Keynes was questioning the deputy governor of the Bank of England — Sir Ernst Harvey — on Threadneedle’s tradition of silence, which Keynes apparently found disconcerting.

Keynes asked Sir Ernst whether, as we put it in “The Verbal Dollar,” it was a practice of the bank never to explain what its policy was. Sir Ernst suggested that it was the bank’s practice to “leave our actions to explain our policy.” When Keynes plowed on, we noted, Sir Ernst famously explained: “To defend ourselves is somewhat akin to a lady starting to defend her virtue.” We love the story (and the point), onto which we were put by the editor of the Interest Rate Observer, James Grant.

That was in 2011, when Mr. Grant speculated that maybe Mr. Bernanke was “reacting to the smoldering populist rage over the inflation he refuses to acknowledge.” (Soon some anodyne apartments in New York City and prosaic paintings were selling above $200 million.) In “its glory days managing the pre-World War I gold standard,” Mr. Grant — one of the Sun’s candidates for Fed governor — had grumbled, the Bank of England had said “next to nothing” but did “conscientiously exchange bank notes for gold, and gold for bank notes, at the statutory rate.”

For our part, we noted that gold and silence are linked. Phrases.org.uk had a whole essay on the etymology of “silence is golden,” laying it to poet Thos. Carlyle, who in 1831 translated the phrase from the German in Sartor Resartus, in which a character expounds how “all the considerable men . . . forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting.” Speech is great, he wrote, “but not the greatest.” And then he cited the Swiss inscription, “Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden.”* If that’s where Mr. Bernanke — and Donald Trump — are going, we say, Godspeed.

________

* Speech is silver, silence is golden.