Submitted 3 weeks ago by sheridan@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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.
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.
I remember reading an article interviewing a man who lived through the early aughts Argentine Great Depression and he said the best horde of value was cheap diamond rings. You could trade one for a handgun, a couple of bags of groceries, even a motorcycle. He said they were even better than krugerrands. Something about how people trusted someone whose trading a family ring more then some profiteer.
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.
Well, you can.
The only gold worth a damn is the stuff in your hands. Gold speculation is not a hedge against financial crises
Let’s be honest though, in a complete societal collapse (not likely to ever happen) if I had sandwiches, and you had a block of gold. Your good is worthless unless someone else is willing to trade for it. You come with gold, say it’s worth something, I say meh, maybe 15 pounds for one sandwich, you say no way, you grow weak through starvation I say 20 pounds, you say no way, grow weaker and I say 30 pounds, you say I only had 15, you die of starvation and I bury your currentpy worthless gold somewhere in case it eventually has value again.
So zoidberg made out like a bandit!
True, in total collapse gold isn’t worth much. However, total collapse isn’t very likely. Across all civilization collapses, it’s never come to that point
Something something you can eat money something.
Maybe someone else would see it differently and pound your head in for 10 pounds. That frees up the sandwich and anything else.
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…
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.
macrotrends.net/…/historical-gold-prices-100-year…
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.
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
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:
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.
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!
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes. Tune all of that nonsense out… But don’t fret if you own a tiny bit, either. That’s fine.
Gold has utility. Every circuit board uses gold.
Same with germanium.
And boron.
…I was gonna say I wouldn’t want a cube of Boron. But actually, I kinda do?
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)
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.
If it’s not too personal, I’m curious where your family escaped from?
Different parts of the family tree, but pre-Soviet Ukraine and Poland.
The Ukrainian family was erased over a period spanning from pre-WWI to pre-WWII. Around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, a large portion was killed for having too close of ties with the Romanov family, and for taking advantage of the commoners. They incorrectly assumed that their social status would keep them safe. By the time that bolshevism fell out of style, anyone who remained was killed off for their radical support for empowering the commoners. Over just a couple of decades, a relatively vast family name was completely wiped out from a vast number of cities and villages. The only thing they all seemed to have in common with each other and those miles alongside them was their religion.
The Polish family either snuck out of Poland around the time that Nazism was becoming more popular, or died. One family member survived after their parents left them with some Catholic friends, and another two family members shockingly survived the concentration camps. My memories of one of them was how hard they’d cry when they’d see any portion of their numeric tattoo.
Now the living parts of the Ukrainian family live throughout the Americas, and believe that fascist leaders have redeeming qualities. Meanwhile, the Polish family is mostly in Israel and is mostly super-cool with Palestinian genocide. Imagine struggling so hard to survive, just for your offspring to perpetuate or promote the same shit that you escaped from.
It is an ok hedge on inflation, but it is pushed a lot by scam adjacent businesses to push up consumption.
The thing about the value of gold in a society is that it is only valued within the society. If society collapses, there will be no group or entity that could value it. You’d need to wait until people start rebuilding. But then you’d need to be in a position to shape how currency is decided on and minted. Unless you’ve kept your load of gold secret, it’ll be hard to convince people to adopt gold as a currency without starting on more even ground.
Ever since we found gold we have valued it. I don’t understand the position of, “Oh, no one will value it!” We love the shit and it’s a store of value. How much value is dependent.
You can’t eat gold, and you can only trade gold for food if that person can trade the gold for something else. I’m not going to say there’s no chance of gold being valuable in a societal collapse scenario, but I’d rather wager with resources than a pretty, shiny metal. I don’t see how that’s a position that can’t be understood. Gold works as an intermediary exchange, but direct barter can always be counted on.
Because it was found by people in society. It was given value within an established society. I’m not saying no one will value it. I’m saying that until there is an established society, it won’t hold value. Then if you do end up in a society, you need to sway them to adopt gold as a currency while keeping your gold stores secret.
Idk man… Humans like shiney baubles. Remember: Gold was a valuable commodity before we even had legit uses for it beyond decoration.
Because it was found by people in society. It was given value within an established society. I’m not saying no one will value it. I’m saying that until there is an established society, it won’t hold value. Then if you do end up in a society, you need to sway them to adopt gold as a currency while keeping your gold stores secret.
To clarify, when people colloquially refer to “the collapse of society” they don’t mean that all forms of society would cease to exist, but the failure of the nation state, or possibly the international order, and the long supply chains that go with it. Etc.
So society at various scales would still exist, in overlapping ways and jurisdictions. Basic units like neighbourhoods and firefighters and towns and regions would be organizing based on the old rules and adapting. People organize well in the absence of warlords, so that and extinction events are the threats to trade.
The value of trade goods might be indeterminate if a comet wipes nearly all of us out. Otherwise, many people love to dicker and argue about the value of things, so I’m pretty confident about rare raw materials like gold having both utility value and a reasonably inflated exchange value in a prolonged regional or international crisis.
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 pleade don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up… There have been times in the 1900’s where people losot 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.
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.
Lately the s&p etfs have been beating gold. So like, it’s not a terrible investment, just there are better ones out there
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.
I’d chop off my own dick if whatever thing is told me to do it
In the event of a collapse like you describe, I’m going to need something I can eat or wear, something tangible I can trade. If you can get enough people together that agree gold is a valuable bearer instrument then you’ve got a government. That’s not really a collapse.
The only things that will have value when society collapses are food, water, shelter, off-grid power, ammunition, and weapons.
Don’t forget “skills you can use to make yourself valuable to a small community”, especially the skills to make food, locate and purify water, construct and maintain shelter, maintain and upscale off-grid power, and use ammunition and weapons.
It will be whatever the remnants of society deem valuable and convenient to use for condensed wealth. Probably bottle caps.
Unrelated, anyone else looking forward to fallout season 2?
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.
So much FUD and complete misinformation here. Gold, first and foremost, is a store of value and a hedge against inflation. It’s a terrible investment. That said, if you bought 10k worth of gold 5 years ago, you would now have 10k. Which is obviously a higher return than most savings products or some actual investments.
It’s a hell of a lot safer than BTC and if society does collapse, it will absolutely retain its value.
if society does collapse, it will absolutely retain its value
Why? It’s not inherently valuable beyond a handful of industrial/electronic uses. If society collapses, people are going to be trading in food, water and medicine, not worthless shiny metal.
Even at the basest level of society that we might fall back to, there will be a need for stores of great value in order to make larger trades. You can’t effectively trade large scale without it. Which might not be relevant right after a full system failure, but definitely afterwards.
If society collapses, then carrying around and securing gold is not safe at all.
Owning land is better to store wealth, but gold is better when fleeing to wherever land ownership is still enforced.
Depends on what you want to achieve.
It’s a hedge against inflation. So in times of high inflation and economic uncertainty it will do well.
Keeping a small amount in a safe in case the world goes to shit, well only after you have a pile of guns, ammunution and canned food.
It’s not a productive asset. If you buy stocks you’ll probably be better off in the long run.
That being said your investment portfolio should not be only one kind of investment and gold should probably be a part of it eventually.
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.
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.
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?
It’s a commodity that’s widely used as a way to keep the value of a portfolio in case of inflation. Gold has a lot of utility but recently because of uncertainty about the US dollar central banks have been stocking up on gold.
Complete societal collapse is very unlikely and we have studied economics enough to the point where hyperinflation is avoidable.
For investors keeping some gold (10-20% of portfolio) can be very nice since it allows you to buy the dip and is inflation proof. On the other hand, gold can become a speculative asset so it’s value can be inflated just like any other commodity. So in a way currently it’s either a nice tool or a bubble (or scam as you call it).
Silver, used in solar panels, is also pretty good for same reasons.
Invest in land: they aren’t making any more of it.
The Dutch: hold my beer
But in a societal collapse owning land doesn’t matter, because land ownership is much more dependent on contracts, which don’t mean jack shit without a society and a government, and if you have to flee because of a war or a natural disaster, you can’t just stuff your forest/house/farmland/whatever in a suitcase and sell it later.
Hawaii’s Big Island be like:
24-hour lava flow asmr
Look at the zoomed out 5 year chart for its price and you tell me.
$1,839 -> $4,217
Yes, but:
macrotrends.net/…/cpi-purchasing-power-of-the-dol…
Gold is just another asset, it belongs in any long term portfolio at least to a small degree, and if you take the possibility of market instability seriously, you might consider keeping some actual metal on hand. Though silver is somewhat more practical for that.
Yeah but so is having any currency
I assume you’re talking about physical gold.
Yes, it’s generally a scam. Some middle man is going to take a cut of what it’s worth before you enter the market - and they’re almost always going to misrepresent it’s value, especially if it’s not in the form of a stamped bar. Then you basically have to store it and shlep it and secure it and keep it secret, which will further diminish profit. Then you have to sell it, presumably as part of your retirement plan…or leave it to somebody who’s going to lose even more of its value when they want to unload it inefficiently.
If you’re not wealthy in the first place it’s only worth investing in as a hobby…because you have to factor in the value of your time and subtract that from its value, as well.
The amount of time it would take for a post collapse society to regain enough stability to return to metal being needed for a currency is likely longer then you would be alive to actually benefit from the investment.
Short term only direct barter and labor will be worth anything. You only need a currency when you have a non volatile society.
It’s why the whole post apocalyptic gold value nonsense is nonsense. You NEED an economy to make currency have value. A post collapse society has no economy.
When was the last complete societal collapse?
Gold is a good hedge against inflation. When was the last hyperinflation in your country?
Lots of things can be used as currency. Gold was the PG because it is scarce, takes work to mine, is finite(ish), it doesn’t tarnish or corrode in air or salt water, isn’t attacked by acids except agua regia, meaning it doesn’t degade over time. It’s a really good medium for labor-value.
Problem is, it’s also a useful metal now, in semiconductors and electronics, so now it is being ‘consumed’ by industry in a way that isn’t readily recoverable except at product end of life, and even then it’s not 100% recycled, probably more like 10%.
So the global supply increases due to work mining, decreases due to consumption as a commodity, and is still treated as a currency equivalent.
Solid gold is easy to store, and will survive calamities, bank collapses, fires, floods, ect where other intrinsic value items don’t.
So it’s a good investment if you believe that you will survive the deletion of society, AND you believe that it will be tradeable post-collapse. Or if you just treat it like a commodity.
But post-collapse, gold isn’t intrinsically useful. In these events, other useful, consumable goods might be better for goods and labour exchange. In the early Australian colonies, there was no money, people bought, sold and got paid in rum.
Rum is a reasonable value holder, it can be preserved against degrading, it is ‘fungible’ and divisible in a way that gold coins arent.
Dried grains are a good currency too. Maize, wheat berries, etc, as long as you accept that your value will be contually consumed and replenished.
Whether a thing has value is largely determined by whether the society you end up in decides it has value.
The indigenous Australians would happily trade a gold nugget for rum or rope or steel tools, because their society had no use for gold, but did have use for steel.
Disclaimer: The only gold I own is in my phone and computer.
Depends on your threat model. During speculative bubbles capital flows towards gainers no matter how crazy (NFTs anyone?). During corrections capital flows back towards commodities, and gold is … er…the gold standard. It has a lot of industrial uses blah blah blah. Copper is also good for these purposes and is an interesting contrast.
Nobody says “if you can’t touch it, you don’t own it” for copper or oil or pork bellies. That’s because that advice isn’t about using gold as an inflation hedge or safe harbour in a bear market. That advice is predicated on compete monetary collapse and the use of gold as currency. If you don’t live in a space where you can grow some of your own food, and have access to potable water from your own well I wouldn’t worry to much about it. You will starve to death or die in the food riots so gold won’t help anyways.
I think the “don’t hold it don’t own it” advice does make sense for a small amount of portable gold if you’re considering a scenario like a fascist government taking over and needing to flee the country with any wealth you can, predicated on the assumption that other countries are still relatively stable.
There are also a lot of silly people who hoard pounds of gold for apocalyptic currency which you’ve pegged.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
When the world collapses, nobody’s going to care about gold.
Stock up on bottlecaps instead.
Starstarz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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?
breakcore@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think they’re referencing the game Fallout where bottlecaps are used as currency
SippyCup@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
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.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We homebrewers will be the thousandaires of the end times!
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Because patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Well, for one thing, the supply of googly eyes will run out and you will have to adapt.
MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
You’re forgetting the crows that like shiny things
hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Make a bunch of shiny trinkets, train a gigantic murder of crows to steal food & supplies and attack on command, profit.