Don't worry about it. Even in Britain, one meets this kind of comic pig-ignorance from time to time. I recall being asked on a school trip to France "if you can drink the water in Paris."

I also recall a French person who claimed to be so afraid of Mad Cow Disease that they wanted to eat no British food at all.

Fortunately, nobody in Britain supports the gold standard. I theorise that the years of depression unleashed by going back on it in 1925 - The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, as Keynes put it - inoculated the nation against this particular economic delusion.

Talking about Nixon's economic policy would have been a welcome respite from the sheer and exceptionally tedious drivel I have had to endure the past two days.

I always used to say that the previous image of the region as a big saudi arabia (which was bad enough) has now been replaced by afghanistan.

As a testament to this, one television programme (Lost) purportedly showning an iraqi village, showed what was clearly an afghani market. In various other media (most evidently political cartoons) the 'arab' image shifted from the ghotra and the goatee to the afghani dress and long beard.

You defended Nixon? Wow!
Actually, I wouldn't defend the Keynes-inspired Bretton Woods, but it was a mistake to ditch the peg to gold without extracting an ironclad agreement to go with strictly floating exchange values thereafter, except of course for the usual extraordinary circumstances (war, depression, plagues, that sort of thing), which would have enforced a similar discipline to gold. Paul Einzig's Destiny of the Dollar, written shortly after the decision, is an excellent little dissertation on all the issues at the time, except he thought floating exchanges would just inspire protectionist behavior via the currency on everyone's part, and would never work. So far, events are proving him right.

Now for the inevitable rant:

As for it causing the depression, well, all I have to say is, if you asked a gold bug in 1913 what would happen if everyone abandoned the gold standard to go to war in 1914, he would have replied, "war, inflation, and then depression." Which, of course, is what happened. Actually, it was war, inflation, revolution, hyperinflation, a wild speculative boom, depression, and then more war, the worst the world has ever seen. That "return to gold" was to a gold-exchange standard where bullion only moved in wholesale amounts, rather than the pre-1914 standard, because Britain insisted on overvaluing itself at the pre-1914 parity, and then of course acted all surprised when the deflation that anyone could have told them would happen from such a dumb decision actually did happen.
Also, since absolute credibility in maintaining a commitment to the standard was killed by WWI, speculation, which had a stabilizing effect under the gold standard, instead had the destabilizing effect we've all come to know and love since. Result, to quote a good site with a good explanation of gold, was as follows:

...monetary policy was affected greatly by domestic politics rather than geared to preservation of currency convertibility. (9) Especially because of (8), the credibility in authorities' commitment to the gold standard was not absolute. Convertibility risk and exchange risk could be well above zero, and currency speculation could be destabilizing rather than stabilizing; so that when a country's currency approached or reached its gold-export point, speculators might anticipate that currency convertibility would not be maintained and the currency devalued. Hence they would sell rather than buy the currency, which, of course, would help bring about the very outcome anticipated.

Which is a neat summary of what happened in the runup to the Depression, and what made it so bad. But the cause of that lack of credibility was WWI.
In sum, the developed world's decision to blow itself up in WWI was the cause of the Great Depression. Of course the world's governments lost all credibility after that disaster.
Only a superficial reading of history would lay the blame on the crippled interwar gold-exchange standard, itself a product of governments' willful refusal - especially Britain's - to face reality.
C'est la guerre.

Post-1971, it was inflation, then stagflation, then, here in the US, the worst recession since the Depression, then, finally, a few years of ultra-high interest rates to squeeze out everything and finally settle it all down. Took more than 10 years to get it all stabilized. And that was just on abandoning a vestigial peg to continue a relatively minor war (Vietnam).
And today we have a complete mess (floating exchanges, pegs to the dollar, a monetary union in Europe) with the US running huge deficits, while running yet another minor war, financed by Asian CB's trying to debase their own currencies even faster than the US is debasing its own, while everyone sits around waiting for it to explode in everyone's faces.
Oh well, can't blame that defunct standard this time. Even the vestiges are gone.

In sum, what has happened is that the world made a collective decision, in 1914, to issue paper so they could have a nice, big fat war, and in the interwar period they wanted to have gold on their own terms rather than on the terms of the market itself, which failed, as such attempts always do, so they just went back to issuing paper. Keynes supplied the big words to justify their decision.

End of rant.

Color me comically pig-ignorant.

if you asked a gold bug in 1913 what would happen if everyone abandoned the gold standard to go to war in 1914, he would have replied, "war, inflation, and then depression."

If everyone abandoned the gold standard to go to war there might be a war! What a prediction.

Oh fine. Take the last two then.
Some people...