TGSN reportsTreasury Department Releases Gold Commission Archives:
The Reagan Gold Commission has an almost mythic status in the history of American monetary policy. As award-winning author and economic historian Brian Domitrovic, an advisor to thegoldstandardnow.org, observed in his Forbes.com column, “The First Gold Commission Scared the Dickens out of the Fed,”
The Commission’s Minority Report, The Case for Gold, signed by Reagan Gold Commissioners Lewis E. Lehrman, founder and chairman of the Lehrman Institute, and by the Honorable Ron Paul, then a rather junior Congressman, remains in print and available from multiple sources. The Majority Report, authored by Milton Friedman collaborator Anna Schwartz, mostly academic interest, also has been available in PDF form, thanks to its posting to the Web by GoldenSextant.com.
Most of the Commission’s archival records, including transcripts and copies of the testimony, however, have remained unavailable to the public. Until now.
The staff of the United States Treasury Department library now has digitized the full record of the Gold Commission. It is in ten volumes, comprising many thousands of pages. Now, for the first time, these materials are available to scholars and the general public.
This record is, so to speak, a gold mine of source documentation. It is certain to prove of keen interest to gold standard advocates, monetary policy experts, economists, historians, and all interested in the important subject of monetary integrity.