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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Fungible, portable, valuable. Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.
Fungible, portable, valuable.
It isn’t fungible. Anyone who has tried to trade physical gold at anything close to the market rate can tell you that. And no retailer is taking a dribbling of yellow sand as payment.
It isn’t portable. You can’t produce a finite denomination of it easily or transfer it electronically or even carry it in a wallet economically.
It isn’t intrinsically valuable. It produces nothing consumable in the way an oil well or corn field or machine shop can. It’s a speculative asset with the potential to be turned into something more useful. But it has no practical use or purpose in a raw state.
Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.
The means by which commodified gold is packaged and sold to gullible investors is very often scammy. And the sales pitch promising future returns on investment are inevitably larded up with rosy predictions unsupported by current data.
The socialized mythology around gold (especially relative to peer commodities like copper or oil) radically inflates its sales price in bubble economies. But there’s no reason you’re going to see better investment performance than a purchase of real estate or commercial equity. And there’s certainly no reason you would want to buy and hold gold long term if you had an opportunity to build or invest in an actual value-accruing business.
At best, a long gold play is a hedge against deflation and economic decline. At worst, its a fad that cycles in popularity relative to cryptocurrency or beanie babies.
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.
Not to be contrarian, but please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up… There have been times in the 1900’s where people lost in gold massively and didn’t recover for decades.
It HAS been a good investment in the last while, but it may have been just luck.
Plus, at the price it’s at now… I kind of fear buying it.
I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.
Edit: typos, I have feet for hands
please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…
I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.
A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”
I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.
That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.
But when you look at the actual price history
there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.
Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.
Gold is only as valuable as people deem it to be. It’s a solid investment because it doesn’t suffer from things like inflation or short sellers. Gold is like a treasury bill in that you’re not going to make a bunch of money short term, but you can be relatively sure you won’t lose you investment long term. I heard something about a decade ago which still holds true: as long ago as the Roman empire, an ounce of gold was worth enough money to get you a top quality outfit including top quality sandals (shoes) and still leave enough for you to get a top quality meal. Will you get those things with gold in an apocalyptic situation? Nah, but assuming human civilization continues to survive, you can expect the value of gold relative to products and services to stay strong while currencies lose value.
You can short gold ETFs. Gold is highly speculative and has crashed taking decades to recover (~1980-2005). It’s basically boomer-bitcoin.
Would you trust this guy’s advice?
I’d chop off my own dick if whatever thing is told me to do it
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.
Societal collapse? No gold won’t save you. Tools and how to use them will.
Maybe during hyperinflation though.
Gods not a terrible investment but it doesn’t have a short term ROI just a REALLY long term one.
I hate Bitcoin but its probably a better investment (and just as useful) than gold.
I’m a fudd though and ONLY buy stable stocks that yield reliable dividends though. ETFs, S&P stuff.
I feel like silver is a more practical apocalypse metal than gold because of its anti bacterial properties. Even if you can’t turn it into surgical tools you can use it to help preserve drinking water.
If they ever get around to capturing an asteroid to mine, your hoarded gold will suddenly be worthless.
Generally speaking, precious metal commodities are a hedge investment; they aren’t a primary investment themselves, but they’re a hedge against a loss in value of other investments, like stocks or bonds. If you are investing in gold as a hedge against inflation wiping out stock market gains, then yeah, it’s pretty solid. You probably don’t want to hold on to it forever though; if you’d bought gold just prior to Carter taking office and the stagflation of the late 70s, you be pretty much break-even with things like index funds.
As far as total societal collapse, you would need to have the physical bullion, not just have precious metals in your investment portfolio. And even then, gold might not have a ton of value in a subsistence society. People might trade for it, but if I had food to trade, I don’t think I’d be trading for gold, since I can’t eat gold. The people that will clean up in a subsistence environment? The Amish.
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
I feel like you could still do very well in life if you controlled literally all the gold in the world, but also he is Warren Buffet and my current wallet is one that I found on the ground, so I am willing to defer to the experts here.
(NB, the wallet was empty, I’m no savage)
In a societal collapse your best investment is between your ears. If you can build/grow/… things you don’t need to worry about losing value.
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.
The thing about gold is they are always mining more of it, not great for long term value
There isnt much actually left and it becomes more and more expensive to mine.
Not that I agree with the specific numbers in this infographic (I have seen estimates between 20-40% remaining) but it illustrates my point. The right cube would be bigger, but not as big as the already mined cube on the left if you included all the gold estimates in total.
In case of complete societal collapse ? Yes.
But if you have to flee from your homeland, gold is a universal currency.
How are you supposed to get it out of your homeland?
Load your gold into your car ? I might have misunderstood the post. If you don’t own it directly it’s no better than any other investment
Wouldn’t they just seize it at the border?
It would probably already be stolen by that point xD
Though, as I said, gold is a pretty universal currency, so if you manage to smuggle it out you can use it almost anywhere. Unlike some obscure national currency or the like
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.
I remember reading Walden and thinking that even many many years ago this dude failed to be entirely self sufficient and still had to head back to town for random shit. It’d be so much harder nowadays.
When the world collapses, nobody’s going to care about gold.
Stock up on bottlecaps instead.
You’re forgetting the crows that like shiny things
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
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.
It’s almost certainly a joke but bottlecaps in a post civilization society would make a pretty decent currency, more so than gold.
They’re light, easy to carry, hard to reproduce and therefore scarce. They’re also useless for anything else. So if you happened to have a lot of caps laying around they might find their way to becoming a currency.
Gold is heavy, requires a lot of work to make it useful as a standard, and has other practical uses. Caps are actually better.
Yeah but making them isn’t complicated just medieval smelting is needed which is basically the iron ages
It’s the crimping and the precision shape that’s hard to replicate, you need a press.
And that would be doable, realistically. Though there’s a bit of plastic on the bottom that would be quite difficult to replicate.
The point is they’re only useful as a currency. And really only to a society that can’t really make much. If society advances again to the point where a used bottlecap can be replicated, other systems will already have been established to make it less attractive.
I think they’re talking about plastic bottle caps.
The caps in fallout are not plastic they’re soda bottles from the 1960s-80s.
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.
