With Mitt Romney pulling away from both Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul in their bid for the GOP presidential nomination, hopes are now dimming that Jim Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer will play an important role in the nation’s monetary policy going forward as Grant is increasingly unlikely to either sit on a new Gold Commission (as suggested by Gingrich) or head the Federal Reserve (as Ron Paul recommended), in the latter scenario, perhaps just exchanging dollars for gold under a new gold standard until such time that the central bank can be disbanded. In this report at MarketWatch, Brett Arends fills in the details:

“Unfortunately, I haven’t heard from Mr. Romney yet,” joked Grant when I called on him in his offices down on Wall Street. “I’m sitting by the phone, I’m ready.”

He may have to wait some time. Romney, a conventional Wall Street figure, is unlikely to tap him anytime soon.
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He is best known these days — to Gingrich and Paul, among others — for his long-standing support for the gold standard. The world has moved in his direction. In 12 years, gold has risen from a derided relic trading at $250 an ounce to a hot investment at $1,750. Everywhere paper currency systems are under challenge. In 2008, the world discovered that you can’t just manufacture endless wealth out of thin air, as the gold bugs had long argued, and it is still struggling with the realization.

Many people will think of the gold standard as a relic of a bygone era, something as old-fashioned as bow-ties and stuffed animals. (My caveat: To me, that’s not an insult.) Grant, when we met, argued the reverse. He says paper currencies and our current monetary system are the ones that are out of date.

“The anachronism is today’s system,” he says. We have a “command and control, top down” system where the Fed imposes an interest rate on society. The Fed, in other words, tells us what the price of money should be. It is, Grant says, at odds with the modern age. “We live in a world of collaborative social networks” of the Internet and Facebook, of Wikipedia instead of the old World Book, and so on. And yet when it comes to the price of money, we wait for a committee that sits in private to tell us what it should be”.

There’s lots more in this story on Grant’s views of the financial system as currently constructed and what he would do if he were to sit in Ben Bernanke’s chair at the Fed. If you ask me, his gold standard price of $2,500 an ounce for the metal seems a bit low.