If things get really bad, i.e depression, have a read of the following. Not every country was affected by the last depression, see China. Entire article at:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boardd...

Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke
At the H. Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia
March 2, 2004

Money, Gold, and the Great Depression

"If declines in the money supply induced by adherence to the gold standard were a principal reason for economic depression, then countries leaving gold earlier should have been able to avoid the worst of the Depression and begin an earlier process of recovery. The evidence strongly supports this implication. For example, Great Britain and Scandinavia, which left the gold standard in 1931, recovered much earlier than France and Belgium, which stubbornly remained on gold. As Friedman and Schwartz noted in their book, countries such as China--which used a silver standard rather than a gold standard--avoided the Depression almost entirely. The finding that the time at which a country left the gold standard is the key determinant of the severity of its depression and the timing of its recovery has been shown to hold for literally dozens of countries, including developing countries. This intriguing result not only provides additional evidence for the importance of monetary factors in the Depression, it also explains why the timing of recovery from the Depression differed across countries."

Cheers