The utter failure of unfunded currency and depression do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.
Anyway, the real lifeboats will be the things people need to live: food being #1, followed by a roof over your head, energy, and medicine/medical care.
Gold will be a shiny, pretty metal that some (not all) who have the above to trade will value.
there will be two classes of people in such a scenario, those who scrounge for necessities and those who buy and sell gold. There will ALWAYS be a buyer for your gold somewhere. don’t kid yourself, gold is still the world’s real reserve currency no matter what Ben Bernanke says.
“It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty.You could buy nothing with your paper money.
– Harvard University law professor Friedrich Kessler on on the Weimar Republic hyperinflation (1993 interview)”
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/hyperinflation.php
If I were a provider of food, housing, energy or medical care I would want to be paid.
Gold and Silver would be acceptable, because they have the attributes of money. Mere currency and barter might become plausible alternative forms of payment, but would carry frictional costs which would tend to up the price.
E.g. A doctor wouldn’t want to be paid in beets or baby-clothes, and he would look askance at a rapidly-depreciating sheaf of Ben Bernanke Clown-Bux. But in 2014 a single oz of Silver will definitely get his attention.
You forgot weaponry and ammo.