Ammo would be quite valuable also.
Yes, gold would be useless IN the economic collapse.
But that’s not what it’s for. Screwdrivers are useless when used as paint brushes, too.
Gold is for preserving wealth until the recovery.
how many canned goods and sacks of flour fit into a bug-out bag if the situation dictates re-location?
not everyone (actually very few folks) can build a long term fortress to defend their stash). eventually the zombies will find the fortresses and eventually the ammo will run out
easier to use junk silver to buy some sugar, aspirin, or a gallon of fuel, than figure out how many cans of peas to trade for it
If gold would still have value, people with guns and ammo would take it. In the case of a collapse, guns, ammo, nonperishable food, and soap would be valuable, and soop could be used as currency, assuming we don’t totally sink to savagery. It can be easily divided and subdivided.
Something tells me that the author really did not have Ezekiel 7:19 in mind when writing this.
And coffee would be especially precious.
Gold hording was good when a local region experienced chaos...the user of gold could move to an economy that still had their system up and running...the problem today is that there would be no place to move that would not be affected by global economic chaos....so horde the items needed to survive...gold should not be one of them...ammo and canned or dried foods ...wine...distilled spirits...medical items...weapons..both blade, gun powder, and archery types will be more valuable than some shiny block of gold!!!
While I have a modicum of staples like that, I am of the persuasion that a typical garden variety bullet will have more tradable value at the micro level.
A friend of mine at www.surviveusa.biz sells fractional gold-—very small denominations that would be perfect for exchange.
Ammo absolutely and canned food. But I’m still betting on dimes. Got a bunch stashed away with my lifetime supply if incandescent light bulbs which will be useless.
Preppers’ PING!!
It is always those without gold and silver that trash it’s usefulness. Do you think those holding gold and silver will be unarmed waiting for someone to steal it? LOL.
Everytime I hear Beck say “gold has never held zero value” I think yeah but you can’t eat it either.
I am so screwed.
Ping!
With enough toilet paper, you could rule the world!
I recommend both, plus an arsenal.
The most important element of a disaster plan is the timetable. For example, what was the timetable of the Great Depression in the US?
1929 was the crash of the stock market. This affected those who invested in the market, at first. But it was just the start of the growing unemployment that peaked about 1934, about 4 years later. And unemployment didn’t really hurt until you were unemployed.
What did hurt a lot of people was when banks were closed, starting in 1933, which meant that people were denied their savings reserves. At about the same time, the private ownership of gold was forbidden. These two actions really forced people who had been careful with their money into the depression.
But overlap that with *deflation*. This effectively meant that prices continued to drop because nobody had any cash money. Even though the Dust Bowl, “the dirty thirties”, wiped out tens of thousands of small farms from Texas North to Canada, there was still far more food produced in farms than there were people able to pay for it.
This only really hurt when prices bottomed out in 1933 and ‘34, when it cost more to ship food to market than it was worth. So on one hand, too much food just rotting in the fields, and elsewhere, people were starving.
Importantly, in trying to protect the people who were suffering the worst, the government did help some of them, but hurt others who could have been okay, and dragged out the depression for years.
So on one hand, for some people the government was good, but for others, it was very bad. And in the balance, it hurt more than it helped in many ways.
And this is perhaps the most important lesson that we today should remember. Government “help” is a devil’s deal, so unless you are devastated, go out of your way to avoid it.
Gold may be great in the long, long, long term, BUT...
How long before society calms down enough to even think about civilized barter/trade after a SHTF scenario?
Gold isn’t even on my radar.