Investing in precious metals always made me laugh though. All currency around you has become worthless; you gonna shave off some gold for some bread?
If I was even anywhere near that point in my life I would rather have tool making stuff like a good mill, a good lathe, and a good welder, not to mention a nice garage to put them.
Oh, yeah, the Goldbug-Prepper ideation of Gold as a way to preserve one’s wealth when society collapses is ridiculous: when things get that bad what matters are the basics like food and water, which for anything more than a few months means growing your own food as you’ll deplete whatever stores you have sooner or later. Then beyond that come all the things needed to (re)build a society and it’s going to be a bartering society, not a “tokens of value” one. Wealth held in some abstract token of “value” only becomes useful much later and it might not even be precious metals.
As I see it, Gold is just a decent insurance for a certain range of systemic risks - think of it as a basket of currencies but simpler and with lower correlation to main currencies. It will insulate you from things like a run of the Dollar (a possible thing when the USD stops being a Reserve currency) or governments continuous devaluating their currency as a way to make up for economic mismanagement (like in India), not from societal collapse.
Investing in precious metals always made me laugh though. All currency around you has become worthless; you gonna shave off some gold for some bread? If I was even anywhere near that point in my life I would rather have tool making stuff like a good mill, a good lathe, and a good welder, not to mention a nice garage to put them.
Oh, yeah, the Goldbug-Prepper ideation of Gold as a way to preserve one’s wealth when society collapses is ridiculous: when things get that bad what matters are the basics like food and water, which for anything more than a few months means growing your own food as you’ll deplete whatever stores you have sooner or later. Then beyond that come all the things needed to (re)build a society and it’s going to be a bartering society, not a “tokens of value” one. Wealth held in some abstract token of “value” only becomes useful much later and it might not even be precious metals.
As I see it, Gold is just a decent insurance for a certain range of systemic risks - think of it as a basket of currencies but simpler and with lower correlation to main currencies. It will insulate you from things like a run of the Dollar (a possible thing when the USD stops being a Reserve currency) or governments continuous devaluating their currency as a way to make up for economic mismanagement (like in India), not from societal collapse.