Gold for house

wood for sheep?

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If you had of invested the equivalent amount of money in the Dow Jones index instead of purchasing 10kg of gold and kept it invested from 1920-2024 you would have ~$15 million.
- This, precious metals are a hedge against hyper inflation. Not an investment.
  
  So I get the idea of a hedge, but I guess the question on my mind whenever I hear talk about hyper-inflation is “what are you going to do with the gold if society collapses?”. My thought is that if the world economy got so fucked up that the US dollar was worthless, and the government didn’t step in, then wouldn’t we sorta be in a failed state? And if we were in a failed state is the plan to sit on the gold in some sort of fortress to wait for civilization to come back? Hoping that you can defend it and that the incoming civilization doesn’t just take it?
  
  I've always assumed you'd melt the gold down and create coins or other tradable sub-amounts of the gold that you could exchange for goods and services. If people are still peopling, they'll still want a currency to transact with; if the dollar has failed then gold has a historical precedent that would probably make it easier to convince people to trade with you using it as a medium of exchange. It always seems like it's more suited to be an emergency measure than a plan A to me.
  
  As far as I know, the idea with holding gold in bank storage is, that if hyperinflation occurs, the currency becomes worthless and there will be economic upheaval, but it will not be the apocalypse. And then a new currency will be created and everybody who held physical assets instead of the old currency will be in a way better position.
  
  If society collapsed, resources required to survive have primary value. Food, water, clothes.
  But the idea of money will still exist. Precious and rare metals will be worth something in a barter economy.
  If you think it would be difficult to defend, you know it would still have value.
  The easiest way to defend it is to keep it secret.
  This is the way the world worked for a long time. That's why the idea of a treasure map exists.
- Not only that, but SP500 pays dividends practically every year, whereas gold costs money to store securely. $15M in SP500 would have netting something around $300k last year in dividends alone.

103 comments