There were ~10 years after the great depression where convertibility was suspended. One decade out of nearly two centuries is not "much."
The amount of currency need not, and arguably should not, scale with the size of the economy. Everything is relative in an economy. When the amount of 'stuff' in an economy grows faster than the amount of currency, then prices decrease - your money becomes worth more - deflation. Vice versa, if the amount of currency in an economy grows faster than the amount of stuff in that economy, then prices increase - inflation.
Inflation is undesirable, but it's in a constant tug-of-war with governments and fiat currency. When governments give themselves the power to print infinite money, they end up doing exactly that, often to the point of destroying their own economy. This is precisely why the Founding Fathers chose the US currency to be coins made of precious metals. It limits the government's ability to damage the country through reckless monetary policy.
Think about how fragile everything is already seeming being glued together by massive fed involvement, quantitative easing, and ever more archaic economic ideas like zero or even negative interest rates. And we're only 50 years into this experiment which, on the scale of something like a broad monetary concept, is barely a blink, and it's starting to come apart at the seams. And this is all during extremely stable years compared to the World Wars and other such events that we overcame in the past.
The amount of currency need not, and arguably should not, scale with the size of the economy. Everything is relative in an economy. When the amount of 'stuff' in an economy grows faster than the amount of currency, then prices decrease - your money becomes worth more - deflation. Vice versa, if the amount of currency in an economy grows faster than the amount of stuff in that economy, then prices increase - inflation.
Inflation is undesirable, but it's in a constant tug-of-war with governments and fiat currency. When governments give themselves the power to print infinite money, they end up doing exactly that, often to the point of destroying their own economy. This is precisely why the Founding Fathers chose the US currency to be coins made of precious metals. It limits the government's ability to damage the country through reckless monetary policy.
Think about how fragile everything is already seeming being glued together by massive fed involvement, quantitative easing, and ever more archaic economic ideas like zero or even negative interest rates. And we're only 50 years into this experiment which, on the scale of something like a broad monetary concept, is barely a blink, and it's starting to come apart at the seams. And this is all during extremely stable years compared to the World Wars and other such events that we overcame in the past.