After 1980, gold never got close to $800 an ounce until, once again, the central bankers began to look imperfect. In 2007, as the American economy struggled to deal with what was then seen as the subprime housing crisis, gold climbed back above $800 and then set a new high, in nominal dollars, early in 2008, early in the American recession.

This time around, the sin of central banks appeared to be one of inadequate regulation, and of allowing a credit boom to get out of hand. If William McChesney Martin Jr., a former Fed chairman, once said the Fed’s job was “to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going,” Mr. Greenspan was spiking the punch during his final years.

The hostility to the Fed since then has been largely based on worries that, Ben S. Bernanke, Mr. Greenspan’s successor, was going to destroy the dollar. Having lowered short-term rates to virtually zero, the Fed and other central banks have purchased huge quantities of government bonds. That is not printing money in the sense that no printing press is involved, but in every other sense it is.

Surely, said those who believe in gold, burdensome inflation was just around the corner. The Republican platform in 2012 did not use the phrase “gold standard,” but said “as we face the task of cleaning up the wreckage of the current administration’s policies,” a Republican administration would appoint a “commission to investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar.”

By the time of the Republican convention, it turned out, gold had peaked at a little more than $1,900 an ounce. This week, in what looked like panic selling, the metal fell back below $1,400.

In 1980, as in this year, gold had attracted a lot of speculators who might or might not care about a gold standard, but who knew a rising market when they saw one. Exchange-traded funds have made it a lot easier to invest in gold — no need to store a gold bar or a bag of coins — and they have also made it much easier to borrow money to support such positions. Margin calls no doubt had something to do with Monday’s plunge, as they did with the collapse of silver futures back in 1980.

In 1980, a case could be made that those margin calls, in the futures market, were brought on by a conspiracy against the people who had driven prices up. An article in Fortune Magazine pointed to changes in the rules at the commodity exchange, making it all but impossible to speculate on silver prices continuing to rise. This time, there are no obvious changes in rules to explain the plunge. It may be that a lot of people simply placed bets with borrowed money, expecting a disaster that has not arrived, and now are scrambling to minimize their losses.