What would have happened during the 2008 Financial Crisis if the US were on the gold standard?

Same thing that happened in 1974 only at a much faster time scale. People would have dumped dollars for gold, and eventually you'd be very quickly off the gold standard.  I think it would have happened in hours.

Obviously it's impossible to say with any certainty since the adoption of the gold standard isn't something that could happen in a vacuum. It would require a huge rebalancing of banks' - especially the Fed's - books. Since the precise causes of the crisis aren't agreed upon ( or even close to being agreed upon) its not easy to even theorize what effects the gold standard would have had on the crisis. However we can say a few things with some certainty. 1. The adoption of the gold standard would have reduced the overall supply of credit, therefore the loans at the margins (specifically subprime mortgages) may well not have been offered, removing the proximate cause of the crisis, though not the long term cause(s). Using your hypothetical of adoption in 06/07, though, many of those loans would already have been made and repackaged. 2.  When the crisis did eventually occur - and it would have, eventually - a lot of central banks would have been scrambling to buy gold so they could ease their own monetary policy. There may well have been havoc in currency and capital markets (capital because gold is such a widely held asset class). Those are the first two thoughts that spring to my mind anyhow. Interesting topic to ponder, though that's all we can do.

The crisis was totally independent of a gold standard. 1. The Fed leaves interest rates too low for too long in an attempt to dig the country out of the hole left by the dot com bust and 9/11. 2. Banks deliberately loan money to people who have no ability to repay (and this was not due to the Community Reinvestment Act or other government programs, those were such a small piece as to be insignificant - it was pure banker fraud.  Just heading this Libertarian piece of BS off at the pass). 3. Banks package the loans and sell them as structured products, and sold them to suckers.  They start to believe their own line of horseshit and start to buy their own products like they were good investments. 4. The Chris Cox and the SEC allowed the investment banks to leverage up to infinity, so they borrowed a lot of money and bought crappy structured mortgage products. 5. A lot of investment bank debt ended up in money market funds 6. The easy credit caused housing prices to skyrocket, and the number of structured products also skyrocketed. -----------   Then the bubble burst    ------------- 7.  Huge impairments in the investment banks due to the huge leverage and crappy MBS heavy balance sheets start to unravel the system. 8.  Run on the money market funds due to their crappy investment bank debt holdings. 9.  Government bailout of the banks Nothing here is specific to fiat currency vs a gold standard, the exact same thing could happen with a gold standard (and did, many times in the past to countries with gold standards - the south seas bubble for example). A gold standard would have made the fallout worse, though, after the crap hit the fan.   If you are locked into a gold standard, you are easy prey - the fiat countries can devalue and kick you in the nuts.

I haven't thought this completely through, but I wonder if we wouldn't have seen a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday type event, where someone got very rich forcing us back off the standard....

The gold standard was used to fix the value of the nations currency(in the year 1900).  It was an attempt to fix the amount of currency in circulation to the amount of gold held in reserve. The view was that gold was stable and the currency was subject to inflation and manipulation if not tied to something stable.  Unfortunately, gold has its own market of industrial and adornment uses in addition to its monetary value.  The dollar as a reserve currency has it's own market demands and constraints quite independent of gold. The Lehman collapse was a market adjustment of the value of housing. The underlying securities were not being debt serviced   When prices moderated speculative buyers could no longer make their returns and low income people were being priced out. I suppose some aggrieved party in 2008 would try to get settlement in gold.  Why not?  When your world has just collapsed you might try anything. But the 2008 collapse should not have affected the price of gold or the dollar that much. Because the real estate market adjustment was separate and distinct from  those two.