Are gold-backed currencies set to make a comeback?

Gold has grown increasingly popular over the past decade, as you might have noticed. It's reached the point where it's regularly covered in Sunday supplements and on the television. Plenty of entrepreneurs are jumping on the bandwagon with bullion dealers, gold vending machines, and 'sell your gold' companies springing up everywhere. Yet gold has retained that faint tang of lunacy about it. It may have gone mainstream, but it's still disreputable. Anyone with an eye to their intellectual credentials can't admit to liking gold. It's still a 'barbarous relic', of interest only to irrational 'gold bugs'. But even that may be changing now. The front page of this morning's FT reports that the head of the World Bank is calling for a new global monetary order. And there could be a role for gold in his grand vision...