“Will Jared Loughner discredit the gold standard?” That is the question being asked, apparently in all seriousness, by the Reuters news wire in the wake of the reports that one of the killer’s obsessions turns out to have been our fiat money. “Loughner’s YouTube videos,” Reuters reports, “are consumed with the idea of creating a ‘new currency,’ one that is nothing like our current, Federal Reserve-controlled greenback.” The way the New York Times put it, in a profile of Mr. Loughner, is that the killer was obsessed with “certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system . . .”

Which “extremist right-wing groups” the Times was referring to the paper didn’t deign to say. But, hey, the United Nations has been carrying on about the need for a new world currency. And as the Gray Lady was moving its profile of Mr. Loughner, the Wall Street Journal was moving an interview with the Communist Chinese strongman, Hu Jintao, who, on the eve of his visit to America, is questioning the dollar. He is, as the Journal put it, “calling the present U.S. dollar-dominated currency system a ‘product of the past,’” and highlighting what the Journal called “moves to turn the yuan into a global currency.” Get set for a column from Paul Krugman saying that if Sarah Palin wasn’t responsible for Mr. Loughner’s rampage then Ben Bernanke was.