The gold standard delivered exchange-rate stability and was abandoned everywhere in the twentieth century. What was the cost that eventually became unbearable?

A. Monetary policy could not respond to domestic conditions

The peg demanded the opposite of what a depressed economy needed, and Eichengreen's argument is that mass suffrage made that trade-off politically fatal. Countries that left gold early recovered from the Depression earliest, which is one of the cleanest natural experiments in economic history.