It is useful to challenge oneself and ask a key counterfactual question towards understanding the full extraordinary symptoms of malaise, some bizarre, experienced under the contemporary dominant monetary regime. In our dialogue, we (the authors) delighted in the power of counterfactual analysis even as it encounters severe limits as to what is possible. In this case, as to examining what was wrong with pandemic era monetary policy in the US (and in Europe/Japan), howe would it have been if the shocks to the system under consideration (war, pandemic, great recession, economic war, for example) had occurred under the gold standard? We can then compare what has happened under the 2% inflation standard or any other bad money regime with the outcome under a sound money regime.