One reason you need a Federal Reserve bank is in order to respond to financial crises and shifting financial markets, like it is doing right now.

The Federal Reserve does not "print money." It does control the money supply, thereby acting as a sort of "throttle" on the economy and a control on inflation. Some kinds of inflation can be partly controlled by the Fed through the use of interest rates to either speed up or slow down the economy. And the Fed does a VERY GOOD job of controling that kind of inflation --- there has not been excessive inflation for more than 30 years. The other kind of inflation comes from an actual real cost of goods that is not controlled by the pace of the economy. Oil is one example, and the cost of oil spreads through the economy, affecting the price of everything else. The Fed cannot do very much about that kind of inflation. But it can respond to other kinds of economic affects resulting from that kind of inflaltion, like recession.

My feeling is that the Fed is very important and mostly does a pretty good job. I've not been able to understand the Ron Paul supporters' hatred of the Fed, and I do not think a gold standard would work. We were on the gold standard during the Great Depression, the worst economic disaster of the last 100 years or more, and the gold standard did not help then.

If you personally want your savings to be backed by gold, you should buy gold.