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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When the world collapses, nobody’s going to care about gold.
Stock up on bottlecaps instead.
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
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.
Well, for one thing, the supply of googly eyes will run out and you will have to adapt.
Because patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
You’re forgetting the crows that like shiny things
Make a bunch of shiny trinkets, train a gigantic murder of crows to steal food & supplies and attack on command, profit.
Complete societal collapse, hard to say what, beyond the basics, would be useful as a medium of barter.
But, in a society facing major issues, e.g., hyper inflation, or say, a US government default, yeah, gold is a pretty decent hedge bet.
The traditional safe haven has been government debt but that’s been seen as an increasingly risky bet where you could lose a lot of money to inflation or worse, government default/intervention.
So, while not ideal, gold at least seems a better bet than most other “safe” places to put one’s money.
Yeah, it really depends on the nature of the societal collapse.
I can imagine situations in which being able to press a gold necklace into the right palm might get you out of a tricky situation.
On the other hand it’s hard to imagine a situation where a horde of gold bullion in your safe at home would be very helpful.
If you don’t hold it, you don’t own it.
Investing in gold someone else holds is silly. Having a few ounces stashed away is just illiquid asset that should be a hedge against inflation.
You can have liquid, premium-free gold by buying an ETF/ETC. Whether you hold it or not is irrelevant in case of hyperinflation. Stashing it away may be useful only if you like to touch it I guess
Executive Order 6102
If it can be taken from you with the stroke of a pen, then it isn’t yours. Gold financial products are useful speculative assets but not for calamity insurance.
ETFs may be useless in case of a calamity (in that case I’d stash bullets and canned food, not gold) but they’re useful for hyperinflation scenarios because the financial system keeps working. See Turkey and Argentina
Well, you can.
The only gold worth a damn is the stuff in your hands. Gold speculation is not a hedge against financial crises
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.
People buy gold cos it just keeps going up. But here is the truth. Gold doesn’t go up, the dollar goes down.
So gold is inflation-proof?
Pretty much. Gold is a time-tested store of value. But it is not a solid investment. (stores of value and investments are not the same thing)
So gold is inflation-proof?
Yes, but only to the extent that you can store it, defend it and find a buyer when needed.
Gold loses value at exactly the rate of the cost of the armed guards you are paying to keep it from being stolen.
Pay too little, and it takes its value to someone else who is better armed or sneakier.
And if someone set aside gold for you that you have never seen, no they didn’t.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart
In August 1976, gold was $35/oz, close to its historical level. By October 1979, it was $380/oz, over 10× increase — peaking (for the 20th c.) in January 1980 at $668/oz.
20× return in 3.5 years.
Gold doubled again in value by December 2010, and again by January 2025 — to $2800/oz.
The all-time high, 20 October 2025, $4377.58/oz.
125× return in under 40 years.
I’ve seen it said: it’s not that gold has gotten more expensive. Its that the USD is debased as a currency against the dollar. The gold standard for USD ended in August 1971.
No its not, because going up in value means its inflating because the base currency you are pegging its value to is also inflating.
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
If you find out where you can get a quality boron cube, would you see if they have any beryllium spheres?
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)
If there is complete societal collapse, then gold is going to be worth nothing, because you cant eat it. Bullets on the other hand you can use to take peoples food, or hunt for your own. So invest in bullets!
Now if you just expect financial collapse but not total societal then sure gold, silver, bonds are probably fine if you want “safe” stable ways to hold your investments.
In most cases, its just fear-mongering and gold has no more actual value than paper currency since they both derive their value from sentiment or perceived value. So if you show up at my house and offer me a small gold bar, you value at $10,000, and I value it at a potato, then your $10,000 is actually only worth a potato.
In fairness, if the US dollar collapses, say, but the euro is fine and you find a way to get to Europe, you’re much better off with a few chunks of gold that will be worth relatively what you bought them for than with wheelbarrows full of hundred dollar bills which are now worth less than paper.
I doubt you get far checking in a suitcase full of gold after the dollar collapses in such a colossal way
I doubt you’d get far even trying to carry a suitcase full of gold.
Start eatin’ yer spinach
You don’t need (and can’t afford) a suitcase full of gold unless you’re obscenely wealthy and can probably just charter a plane anyway. There are hundreds of accounts of e.g. Jews fleeing Nazi persecution (and Nazis fleeing the allies post-war) carrying wealth for bribes or starting over or what-have-you in the form of gold jewelry worn on the person or gold coins.
Bullets should be saved for protecting your community…trap and snare your animals :)
Naw use em to shoot people in the wasteland and take their things.
Ain’t no one safe in the post apocalyptic waste lands!
You can definitely make an argument that “proactive” protection is a strategy :)
I needed your stuff so I could have more stuff.
Yeah, gold isn’t worth anything unless a community agrees to assign a value to it, which probably won’t happen in an apocalyptic scenario. If you really want to be prepared, you need to stock up on things that are actually useful:
- non-perishable, nutritious food (preferably something that has a lot of calories in a small serving so you could carry it on you)
- drinking water!! you would have to change it every once in a while though, so you wouldn’t be drinking germ soup if a societal collapse actually happens
- durable, good quality clothing for various climates/weather conditions (due to climate change and the possibility that you would flee somewhere, you should preferably have clothing suitable for other climates than just the one you’re used to)
- miscellanous supplies, like tools for building shelters, farming, making & maintaining different items, destroying things like trees or rocks to make space for building/agriculture or more likely, obtain materials. Things to protect yourself and your loved ones from the elements, like a good tent, sleeping bags, etc. Flashlights, powerbanks, batteries, water purifiers, multitools…
- knowledge. No matter how much stuff you have, it’s no use if you don’t actually know how to do things. Learn canning, blacksmithing, sewing, gardening, fishing, carpentry, foraging, and so on.
If it gets so bad that you need tools for building shelter, you are absolutely fucked unless you already have farmland and can defend it. People are massively ignorant about how difficult it is to live off the land if you don’t have experience in it and a lot of supplies and knowledge accumulated. It takes acres of crops and animals to support a couple people. It takes months or even years to make that land productive enough to keep you barely alive. Then if you have hard winters you better hope you have a stockpile.
Financial collapse is one thing, but a total societal/technological collapse would be bad in orders of magnitude that I don’t even know how to describe it.
Source: work in logistics.
I’m acquiring a little gold. Not a lot, but enough.
What’s enough? When my family was escaping persecution, they managed to travel under the cover of night and stayed in people’s barns and homes during the day. They planned and managed these arrangements via transactions using gold coins, links or pieces of jewelry, or other relatively universal valuables. They also got away a couple of times using the same goods to bribe authorities.
A small number of generations of my family dealt with being told that their money or credit was devalued due to their religion, profession, or relationship to public figures. In those instances, the family members who fled survived, and most of the ones who didn’t flee died.
I don’t know that I have much faith in my ability to flee anything, so I’m not investing that much time or money into acquiring gold things. Found some old watches from my grandparents/great-grandparents that claim to have gold in them. Have a couple of my own little things and jewelry I’ve given my wife. All just things when the time to survive arrives. Which it might not ever.
I hope this somewhat answered your question.
Almost always yes, it is a scam. Theoretically, it’s a hedge against inflation, but in practice, it’s just grifters selling it to paranoid right wingers
Glenn Beck added $1000 to the price of gold in the last decade.
It is an ok hedge on inflation, but it is pushed a lot by scam adjacent businesses to push up consumption.
Would you trust this guy’s advice?
I’d chop off my own dick if whatever thing is told me to do it
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.
You using XAU for gold or something else? Also have a favorite gov bond etf? I am not the best at evaluating those
I used IAU for the few instances I banked gold as a hedge. But I’ve never held longer than a year and it’s never outperformed by overall portfolio returns.
It’s just not a good long term investment.
Lately the s&p etfs have been beating gold. So like, it’s not a terrible investment, just there are better ones out there
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.
Owning land is better to store wealth, but gold is better when fleeing to wherever land ownership is still enforced.
