October 13, 2008 by Philip Brewer Wisebread.com Financial panics used to be quite ordinary. In the century or two prior to the great depression, there was a panic every 15 or 20 years. Since the great depression we haven't had a classic financial panic, until now. There's a thing or two that we can learn from panics past to help us survive the current one. To begin with, there's a reason why we haven't had financial panics for the past 75 years--fiat currency. Panics and gold Panics used to begin when people decided to get their hands on actual, physical gold. That could happen for a lot of different reasons. Often it was because there had been inflation--banks issuing bank notes far in excess of the gold they had on deposit--and people decided that they didn't trust their bank. Sometimes, though, it happened without any particular malpractice by the banks, simply because there was a demand for gold someplace else--an economic boom in Europe or South America could drain gold from the United States or vice versa.