The latest Econ Journal Watch podcast, hosted by yours truly, is now available for listening. In it I talk with Richard H. Timberlake, my former colleague at the University of Georgia, about the historical record of the gold standard and central banks. In particular, Timberlake argues (contrary to Barry Eichengreen, Ben Bernanke, and Peter Temin) that the failures of the monetary system between the wars were due to central bank intervention and mismanagement, not to the gold standard. After all, the classical gold standard worked well before WWI. At that time central banks either didn't exist (as in the US) or let the gold standard do its thing to equilibrate money supply and demand. Toward the end we talk about Bernanke's views and current monetary policy.