I know people out there who have invested a lot in gold under the belief that in the event of like complete societal collapse or hyperinflation, they could use it for purchasing.
I have the hunch it’s a scam, but I haven’t learned enough monetary theory, business, or economics to understand why.
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When the world collapses, nobody’s going to care about gold.
Stock up on bottlecaps instead.
As a person who has an abnormal number of bottlecaps for hobby reasons, thank you for making me feel rich! Also, why would anyone else want these?
I think they’re referencing the game Fallout where bottlecaps are used as currency
We homebrewers will be the thousandaires of the end times!
I mean, considering the fact that numerous pre-modern cultures relied on (diluted) alcohol as their main drink since water was too dirty to drink safely without mixing it in with wine/beer/whatever, and that a lot of people would use alcohol to cope with te hard times that might actually be a good skill to have in the scenario of large amounts of infrastructure becoming unusable. (modern knowledge of germ theory & boiling drinking water would probably make it a lot more useless, but I bet you could find people willing to trade supplies with you for a nice drink.
Because patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
Well, for one thing, the supply of googly eyes will run out and you will have to adapt.
You’re forgetting the crows that like shiny things
Make a bunch of shiny trinkets, train a gigantic murder of crows to steal food & supplies and attack on command, profit.
If you don’t hold it, you don’t own it.
Investing in gold someone else holds is silly. Having a few ounces stashed away is just illiquid asset that should be a hedge against inflation.
You can have liquid, premium-free gold by buying an ETF/ETC. Whether you hold it or not is irrelevant in case of hyperinflation. Stashing it away may be useful only if you like to touch it I guess
Executive Order 6102
If it can be taken from you with the stroke of a pen, then it isn’t yours. Gold financial products are useful speculative assets but not for calamity insurance.
ETFs may be useless in case of a calamity (in that case I’d stash bullets and canned food, not gold) but they’re useful for hyperinflation scenarios because the financial system keeps working. See Turkey and Argentina
Well, you can.
The only gold worth a damn is the stuff in your hands. Gold speculation is not a hedge against financial crises
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes. Tune all of that nonsense out… But don’t fret if you own a tiny bit, either.
I kind of like Warren Buffet’s ramblings on it:
Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.
You could take all the gold that’s ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that’s worth at current gold prices, you could buy all – not some – all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take?
Gold has utility. Every circuit board uses gold.
Same with germanium.
And boron.
…I was gonna say I wouldn’t want a giant cube of boron. But actually, I kinda do?
only a complete bidiot or bignoramus wouldn’t
If you find out where you can get a quality boron cube, would you see if they have any beryllium spheres?
If you invest in gold that is not physically in your posession, then yes.
If society breaks down, who is going to honor that piece of paper that claims you own gold in some banks vault? You don’t even know where that gold actually is…
I am not sure how useful owning the actual precious metals would be in a societal collapse. It’s going to lose value quickly. It would take probably 5-10 years before some rich rober baron decides to make a market for it where it gets a decent trade value again. An Oz of gold is going to mean a lot less to me than box of bullets or some chickens, unless I can find someone to give me a ton of that stuff in trade before my family starves I am going to take the chickens.
Much more useful in a hyper inflation scenario.
In a societal collapse, it will be rather worthless, yes. But in an economic collapse, it probably retains more value than paper money or stock options. Property, of course, is premium. If you can uphold claims to it…
Also a in a societal collapse markets will reestablish themselves relatively quickly so if you have a trade good like gold, copper, or silver you could probably use it as a solid liquid asset. Mind you I’d say a 1-2 year minimum for markets to reestablish themselves so you have to survive that first. Also you will be at the mercy of the merchants and tradesmen regardless.
I’m acquiring a little gold. Not a lot, but enough.
What’s enough? When my family was escaping persecution, they managed to travel under the cover of night and stayed in people’s barns and homes during the day. They planned and managed these arrangements via transactions using gold coins, links or pieces of jewelry, or other relatively universal valuables. They also got away a couple of times using the same goods to bribe authorities.
A small number of generations of my family dealt with being told that their money or credit was devalued due to their religion, profession, or relationship to public figures. In those instances, the family members who fled survived, and most of the ones who didn’t flee died.
I don’t know that I have much faith in my ability to flee anything, so I’m not investing that much time or money into acquiring gold things. Found some old watches from my grandparents/great-grandparents that claim to have gold in them. Have a couple of my own little things and jewelry I’ve given my wife. All just things when the time to survive arrives. Which it might not ever.
I hope this somewhat answered your question.
Gold is not going to save you. I’d we get to the point that gold becomes currency again, that will be the least of your worries. Those are just prepper fantasies.
If you are considering investing in gold as an asset, sure that’s legit.
It’s… Not really a scam so much as a thing for weird cranks who think the apocalypse is coming. If you have gold then you have gold. And gold will likely hold its value for a long time because it’s a rare resource. Unless we find some alchemy that turns common materials into it, it will likely stay that way. So if you buy gold at market value then you can always sell it later at market value, and that market value is almost guaranteed to be higher than when you bought it.
The people who are really into it though are the weird cranks. And I’d imagine certain stocks or even bonds are arguably better returns in the same time span.
Look at the zoomed out 5 year chart for its price and you tell me.
$1,839 -> $4,217
So much FUD and complete misinformation here. Gold, first and foremost, is a store of value and a hedge against inflation. It’s a terrible investment. That said, if you bought 10k worth of gold 5 years ago, you would now have 20k. Which is obviously a higher return than most savings products or some actual investments.
It’s a hell of a lot safer than BTC and if society does collapse, it will absolutely retain its value.
if society does collapse, it will absolutely retain its value
Why? It’s not inherently valuable beyond a handful of industrial/electronic uses. If society collapses, people are going to be trading in food, water and medicine, not worthless shiny metal.
Even at the basest level of society that we might fall back to, there will be a need for stores of great value in order to make larger trades. You can’t effectively trade large scale without it. Which might not be relevant right after a full system failure, but definitely afterwards.
Why? It’s not inherently valuable beyond a handful of industrial/electronic uses.
It has the precedent of societal agreement going back thousands of years longer than literally anything else besides food and prostitution. If the world started over from the stone-age, people would be using precious metals to represent value all over again. You don’t need it to make sense, you just need a social agreement, and that doesn’t happen with just anything that can fall apart or decay or be found easily.
If society collapses, then carrying around and securing gold is not safe at all.
It isn’t even safe today, but people still do it.
Invest in land: they aren’t making any more of it.
But in a societal collapse owning land doesn’t matter, because land ownership is much more dependent on contracts, which don’t mean jack shit without a society and a government, and if you have to flee because of a war or a natural disaster, you can’t just stuff your forest/house/farmland/whatever in a suitcase and sell it later.
Hawaii’s Big Island be like:
24-hour lava flow asmr
The thing about the value of gold in a society is that it is only valued within the society. If society collapses, there will be no group or entity that could value it. You’d need to wait until people start rebuilding. But then you’d need to be in a position to shape how currency is decided on and minted. Unless you’ve kept your load of gold secret, it’ll be hard to convince people to adopt gold as a currency without starting on more even ground.
Ever since we found gold we have valued it. I don’t understand the position of, “Oh, no one will value it!” We love the shit and it’s a store of value. How much value is dependent.
Because it was found by people in society. It was given value within an established society. I’m not saying no one will value it. I’m saying that until there is an established society, it won’t hold value. Then if you do end up in a society, you need to sway them to adopt gold as a currency while keeping your gold stores secret.
I disagree. look at the failed states right now. USD and precious metals are the most valued means of trade.
To clarify, when people colloquially refer to “the collapse of society” they don’t mean that all forms of society would cease to exist, but refer to the failure of the nation state, or possibly the international order, and the long supply chains that go with it. Etc.
So society at various scales would still exist, in overlapping ways and jurisdictions. Basic units like neighbourhoods and firefighters and towns and regions would be organizing based on the old rules and adapting. People organize well in the absence of warlords, so that and extinction events are the threats to trade.
The value of trade goods might be indeterminate if a comet wipes nearly all of us out. Otherwise, many people love to dicker and argue about the value of things, so I’m pretty confident about rare raw materials like gold having both utility value and a reasonably inflated exchange value in a prolonged regional or international crisis.
Depends on what you want to achieve.
It’s a hedge against inflation. So in times of high inflation and economic uncertainty it will do well.
Keeping a small amount in a safe in case the world goes to shit, well only after you have a pile of guns, ammunution and canned food.
It’s not a productive asset. If you buy stocks you’ll probably be better off in the long run.
That being said your investment portfolio should not be only one kind of investment and gold should probably be a part of it eventually.
There are a lot of delusional people in here posting about their personal shower-fantasies of what they would do in the apocalypse. You can safely discard all that. If it gets so bad you need guns and tools and… blacksmithing supplies? you are so utterly fucked that gold and bartering will be the last of your concerns. People will be fucking eating each other. You simply cannot run to the woods and start living off the land, you will starve and die without acres of ready land already producing food. Real-life isn’t like a survival video game, there is no tech-tree that you can climb and start producing food.
Read some Cormac McCarthy for a more realistic view of the end of the world. (Then have a therapist on hand for the after-effects.)
For a financial collapse, gold would probably retain value, a society still needs something to base the value of its trading on, we can’t just all carry around sacks of grain. How much value gold will retain is very hard to predict, but people have been using it for so long that it’s already survived several widespread disasters and is still in use.
It’s a commodity that’s widely used as a way to keep the value of a portfolio in case of inflation. Gold has a lot of utility but recently because of uncertainty about the US dollar central banks have been stocking up on gold.
Complete societal collapse is very unlikely and we have studied economics enough to the point where hyperinflation is avoidable.
For investors keeping some gold (10-20% of portfolio) can be very nice since it allows you to buy the dip and is inflation proof. On the other hand, gold can become a speculative asset so it’s value can be inflated just like any other commodity. So in a way currently it’s either a nice tool or a bubble (or scam as you call it).
Silver, used in solar panels, is also pretty good for same reasons.
