Ten years ago this week, Alan Greenspan left his post as head of the US Federal Reserve, facing disgrace among hard money advocates, which largely persists to this day.

However gold investors can learn an important lesson from how little influence Greenspan, one of the gold standard’s most eloquent backers, had during his 18-year tenure. A lesson that provides important clues as to future central bank monetary policy and its effect on precious metals prices.

That Greenspan was, and remains, a hard money advocate, is beyond doubt. His landmark article “Gold and Economic Freedom,” which was published in The Objectivist , an Ayn Rand-backed newsletter, fifty years ago this June, makes the case for a gold standard in layman’s terms, better than anyone before or since.

“Gold and economic freedom are inseparable,” wrote Greenspan. “The gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire (capitalism) and … each implies and requires the other.”

Greenspan’s advocacy of the gold standard was a hugely controversial position in the 1960s and 1970s and remains so to this day. That this is so is in an illustration of the economics profession’s almost total support for policies that have turned all Western nations into de facto state-run economies.

Why did Greenspan compromise?

That Greenspan compromised his views on gold is well-known. During his time there, the US Federal Reserve spawned a series of bubbles, that sowed the seeds of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, as well as of instabilities that remain in the system to this day.

However it is also fairly clear from comments that Greenspan made after his time in Washington, that he remains a hard money advocate. “Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency,” Greenspan told a meeting of the Council of Foreign Relations last year. “No fiat currency, including the dollar, can match it.”

It is also almost certain that Greenspan held that position during his entire time in Washington. Indeed one of his first acts, after he was appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in 1974, was to invite Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a hard money advocate herself, to his inauguration dinner.