Precious Metals
Precious Medals (PM’s) are a solution to particular problems, not a blanket sollution to all problems. They are mostly handy for wealth preservation. Gold is uniquely suitable as money because it is impossible to counterfeit thanks to its high density and other unique properties. Silver has additional practical survival uses such as helping purify water sources, creating reflective surfaces and medicinal applications.
This is kind of like having supplies of shelf stable foods. It isn’t really a viable longterm strategy but it can help you bridge the gap between periods of no food and food production. Similarly PM’s can preserve your wealth across periods of economic instability. Either way you’d do well to be able to grow your own food and earn money somehow. Stores are stores, renewable sources are another thing entirely.
Do not correlate your Metals that you HAVE with PM values. Those values are speculations based on current federal Reserve Notes. If you actually have the metals, when the Federal Reserve FAILS which it will eventually. Your gold will carry over into the new monetary system which the US Treasury will have to make(and they already have plans and material to do so). Watch the PM market with the knowledge that it is nothing more than a temperature gauge of how sick the Federal Reserve is.
Suppose you’ve got a farm, shelf goods, fuel, and a truck. You have monetary gyrations, either/or deflation such that there’s no work that pays and no goods that are worth much, or inflation such that a cup of rice costs $100,000. That’s not a joke–in the last months of Weimar, an entire life insurance policy wasn’t worth a postage stamp.
But you’re prepared, the money doesn’t matter. Ooops, except for your tax bill–you sold the petrol and truck and still lost the farm and are out on the street despite your preparations. What will you do for taxes when you’re unemployed for 3 years? Or when your tax bill is $2,000,000.00 a year?
Gold and silver tend to maintain their relative values during monetary gyrations. That’s why they call them an “anchor’ but it might better be called a “sea anchor”. Savings in other forms may be at risk depending on conditions that can occur quite suddenly. Rice and bullets still have value but they take up a lot of space and you’d need to sell them to someone with–money–to pay your lawyer or tax bill. History has shown gold and silver–so far, meaning 250 generations–have been the best commodity to hold your value in. –But bullets have only been around 25 generations, who knows? Maybe we’ll see something new this time.
One of three things is going to happen:
The world is going to keep muddling along about the way it is now, PM’s will somewhat keep pace with inflation, and maybe silver will rocket one day when the COMEX finally defaults like the LME did on nickel recently. THIS is the best thing that could happen, IMHO and I sincerely hope it does. My PM’s will help me “survive” old age in some security.
OR
The world is going to go to crap IN SOME MANNER.
It could be:
A total collapse of civilization due to war, a virus, a comet hitting earth, who the heck knows…..but in any case, PM’s won’t do you a lot of good for LONG time after I’m thinking…..survival is going to mean water, food, shelter, defense, fuel, etc…..and I have always, 100% of the time, said “GET THIS IN ORDER BEFORE YOU EVER BUY THE FIRST HUNK OF SILVER OR GOLD”…..because you are going to USE most of this stuff anyway, whether the world ends or not…..so just buy it ahead of time, and have the insurance…..duhhh….is this so hard to understand ?????
OR
It could be a PARTIAL collapse of society…..like the Great Depression ( which wasn’t all that Great for many ), which we are overdue for, if you believe that such events are cycles in history. This could take the form of a deflationary depression ( like the last one ) where fiat money simply becomes scarce….or it could take the form of an inflationary collapse like 1920-22 Wiemar Germany, where fiat money becomes worthless in a big hurry……..or it could take the form of lots of OTHER fiat currencies hold their value and JUST the US ‘dollar’ goes rapidly in the toilet because the world dumps our debt on the market, collapsing the buck overnight. Precious metals are gonna be REAL handy for survival in about any of those situations….because the root problem of all of them is THE PRINTING OF FIAT MONEY and the world will be looking for REAL MONEY, which PMs are.
SO, in 2 out of 3 possible situations I laid out, PM’s are going to be a handy item to own. But if you think civilization is going to collapse to the point the few that are left are going to be living in caves and eating grubs for food, then I ‘probably’ wouldn’t buy PMs…….as you will likely be long dead before civilization ever comes back to the point of commerce again.
Recommended reading at http://goldismoney.info
