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They have it exactly backwards. Leaving the gold standard caused the Great Depression, acknowledging the reality that we had left the gold standard and subsequently devaluing the currency forced prices up to fall in line with debt and allowed for rational trading and lending to resume. The U.S. effectively left the gold standard in 1917 when it began the issuance of over $20B in Liberty Bonds, convertible to gold at maturity, to fund our participation in WWI. These represented 50% of the pre-war GDP and over four times the previous gold obligation of the U.S., an amount that the U.S. could never (and would never) pay off. Those bonds were converted to fixed-rate T-Bills over the course of the next decade in a scheme involving the Fed and Treasury that essentially allowed banks to buy T-Bills on credit at about 2%, sell them immediately to the public at slightly below par, and earn interest on the proceeds at 4-5% until the gov't asked for the money to pay operating costs. The T-Bills rates were fixed at greater than market interest to ensure that all treasuries offered would sell, and the effect was that banks were guaranteed to sell all the T-Bills they purchased to secondary the market. In early 1929, the gov't announced that it would no longer issue T-Bills at fixed rate, but would auction them off, as they still do today. This would cut off a huge source of profit to the banks, and by the time the first auction occurred, in November 1929, the market had already crashed. It was the public's realization that the government had left the gold standard (i.e., could not honor its convertibility obligation), and the banks' unwillingness to play along any longer, that precipitated the crash, and it was the gov't acknowledgment of reality almost five years later that led to a short-lived recovery starting in 1934. As for the gold standard, there's a lot of misunderstanding going on here. All the gov't needs to do to establish a gold standard is pass a law declaring gold convertibility of U.S. currency at a given rate. That rate would be an exact number = (currency in circulation)/(gold reserves). That number can be as high as it needs to be to provide 100% convertibility. That's the definition of a full reserve gold standard. A fractional reserve gold standard means that the government print more money (or other obligations) than can be redeemed for gold... until the people catch wind. Fractional reserve banking is a completely different concept. It involves adding other assets as backers of money (M1, M2, M3), so that the monetary base of gold-backed currency can be expanded into monetary aggregates of both currency and asset-backed deposits. A bank that maintains a reserve of currency for day-day transactions and backs its deposits with assets with values considerably larger than the amount of their loans, can operate safely and generate an expanded monetary supply far greater than what could be provided with just gold as a backer of money. This means that the limitations on gold supply act as a regulator but not a hard limit to money supply, even in a full reserve gold standard. It is when banks fail to maintain adequate reserves that they risk a liquidity run, and it is when they fail to adequately evaluate collateral that they face a solvency crisis. It was the mis-evaluation of house values based on mark-to-market in a bubble that caused banks to back their deposits and MBS's with insufficient salable collateral that caused the mortgage meltdown.

As cliche as it is.. (and as much as I feel it is traditionally used as a one phrase catch all by morons). There is some truth to the saying "haters gonna hate" People need to feel good about themselves. Some people do it in a productive way by getting in shape, learning and improving themselves. Others, go about it by believing in god and that they are his special child and live perfectly according to a set of rules which are impossible to practically follow.