aldoushuxley has a lovely post that, sadly, is Friends only regarding his insight into where he sees the economy going and what investments strategy (if you can call running like hell a strategy) will minimize your losses. What I like most about aldoushuxley is a) reading about his dating life and b)his position on gold being the best way to preserve your wealth. (Preserve..not increase, but *preserve*).
Zero has gold. Not much. Gold is expensive stuff. (Although it was cheaper when I started buying it..the fact its price has gone up so much as people flock to it to protect their assets should tell you something.) And, of course, golds lesser cousin, silver. Invariably, those of us in the ‘preparedness community’ look on silver/gold in one of two ways:
Its a great medium and the closest thing to a universal currency
or
You cant eat it or shoot it, so its worthless
I subscribe to the former line of thinking. Short of a nuclear explosion in every major American city at the same time, we’re not going to have a Mad Max world overnight….nope, I think your going to see a slide into a dystopic situation akin to Soviet Moscow, Bosnia, Argentina, or anyplace in Africa – food lines, checkpoints, rolling blackouts, rampant corruption and crime, etc, etc. And in situations like that, a little gold goes a long way to getting you through that checkpoint, out of that cell, or to the head of the line.
More realistically, there will be times when checks and credit cards are worthless. Happens all the time. Hurricanes and floods knock out power and all the credit card machines are offline. At times like that, cash is king…but cash can lose its value, gold seems to just keep chugging along.
So, I play it safe….the usual goodies – food, water, ammo, meds, gear, etc…and some silver/gold. Never know when your going to need a universal currency.
This I agree with you 100%. I am gold keeper/horder, and come from a long line of them. I like tangible assets.
Yep, me too. I have family that lived through the bank collapse and the Depression and they believe in tangibles. Some of them even have safes mounted in the foundations of their homes, and while they may only keep $5k in the bank, they’ve got dozens of gold bars buried at their homes.
I buy my gold in the form of jewelry. (Can’t quite afford gold bars yet.) I wear a 24k bracelet that I know could get me out of a tight spot if I ever needed it.
Can’t shoot it? It might not be as nice as nails and broken glass, but even short of melting it, it shore can put a hurtin’ on somebody…with proper kinetic persuasion… 😉
I melt my silver down and store it in the form of .45 slugs on reloads. Just in case 😉
Can’t shoot it? With a specific gravity of 19.3, gold is quite a bit more dense than lead at 11.35 and depleted uranium at 18.7. The higher the ratio of density to cross-section of a given projectile, the better it’s ballistic coefficient. In fact, I suspect that gold-core bullets would make more effective armor piercing rounds than depleted uranium, and if you can manage to make a bullet keep it’s shape, with copper jacket for example, you could definitely make a very effective long-range bullet with it. Not cheap, but probably more effective than anything else there is.
No, I didn’t write the article. It’s from a newsletter I get and I friended so I don’t get in trouble with the author for putting it all over the Internet. I absolutely agree that gold bullion is the way to go at the moment. That’s where my spare dollars are going. All this debt (government, corporate, and consumer/mortgage) is not going to be paid back in anything approaching comparable value currency. I see much higher interest rates coming and a lower standard of living as the dollar continues to decline- much like Britain between 1945 and 1980.