They sure did understand the value of an anchor. They had also been made aware of the US rampant printing of federal reserve notes and started calling in their gold reserves en masse . Mitterrand was the most memorable to me. That's a great question: where would we be had there not been the Great War and its sequel? A world of stable exchange rates, and import and export balances regulated by gold? A fed reserve note redeemable in gold? Or maybe Thomas Moore's Utopia? Lol.