Probably not, but I’d argue that gold was the constant because it superseded silver in modern times starting at least in the late 19th century if not earlier, whereas nothing has ever superseded gold even if silver was more common in prior centuries. The US Government’s Bullion reserve at Fort Knox is all gold; the Bank of England vault contains the gold reserves of Great Britain and holds gold on behalf of many other governments. Neither the US nor Britain hold silver reserves as monetary instruments, AFAIK.
After a bit of googling it turns out that usable bullets can not only be made from gold, it’s occasionally actually been done.
Or could it be that they have gold (at home) in investment quantities and don’t want to advertise that to others as gold is pretty much a bearer instrument and don’t want to be a target of a thief?
He could be a lizard person from a faraway planet who believes that krypton is the real sacred metal, and he hates the gold worshippers as a result.
Investment advisors discuss how their clients should invest; they don’t need to ever mention how they themselves invest.
In my experience, people who are dogmatic about investing in gold do so because of one main reason split into two sub reasons- the main reason is that they distrust the financial market system, and (one) feel like gold is something tangible in some way that they can actually physically get hold of in a pinch. And (two), they feel like regardless of what happens, physical gold will retain some value, while stocks and bonds may not.
It’s a step from conspiratorial thinking if you ask me; I figure if things get to that point, someone’s few thousand dollars in gold isn’t going to be as useful as the same amount of shelf-stable food, liquor, ammunition, or fuel, or something else more practical than that in the short term.
My take is that when we are kids we have a very simple idea of “money”. You (or your parents) get it from jobs, you spend it on stuff. If you accumulate a big pile of it, then you’re rich, and sometimes you put that big pile of money in the bank to keep it safe.
Then we learn about fractional-reserve banking, and that there is a “money supply” and that the bank is not just a “vault” with all of the money you deposited in it. It’s one of the “your parents sometimes make mistakes” or “0.99999… = 1” level changes in perspective in how the world works that we all go through as we grow up.
At that point people split into two camps:
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The first develops a more nuanced perspective on how economics works, that it s fundamentally about the processes by which resources are allocated and used, and that currency is a useful but fundamentally human-created part of those processes.
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The second insists that money really does work the way they thought it did as a kid, and the fact that it doesn’t is because the financial system is full of cheaters, and there is some “deeper” money concept that is as simple as the kid version – you just need to replace money with gold.
Of course, “investing in gold” usually doesn’t mean getting a physical, tangible thing. You get a certificate stating that someone else is holding your gold for you. Which certificates will be just as meaningful as any other financial document, if the zombies take over.
Marx phrased this more succinctly as the “fetishization of money”, the idea that the means of exchange has its own intrinsic value, rather than being a socially constructed proof of claim on future production.
Gold is portable, scarce, and hard to counterfeit. That’s why it works so well as money. But in an apocalypse scenario, with economic production being at subsistence scale, with no demand for its intrinsic value, necessities like food and medicine are literally more than their weight in gold.
In that scenario then gold can no longer support any claim on future production. It’s a perfectly adequate means of exchange, but if there’s no marginal production then there’s not much surplus to be exchanged, hence little if need for currency.
I’m not sure if “usually” is correct. It’s certainly possible to buy literal gold bars which end up in your physical possession. There are many places to do this online, like JM Bullion and APMEX. I would think the wise prepper would usually be buying physical gold rather than investment instruments.
Let’s consider what ‘invest’ means when it comes to buying gold. Preppers aren’t investing in gold. They’re investing in a dystopian dream, though most of us would call that a nightmare. That’s why they’d want the physical gold because when people have nothing they’ll still want gold. Also known as magical thinking.
As a financial investment gold is quite attractive. As an investment it doesn’t require taking possession of gold you own. You don’t have to even be investing in ownership of some particular pieces of gold, or gold ownership at all. There are arguably better investments, but gold is not going to become valueless overnight or in any predictable future.
I think the majority of gold investors buy physical gold. It’s easy and compact. Heck, $10,000 is 4 small coins in the palm of your hand. The people who own shares in a gold firm are more likely to be speculators. If the spot drops $50 they can buy $100,000 in a second. And sell it the next day if it goes up $50.
What’s the difference between “investing” in gold and “speculating” in gold?
It’s one of those wierd English grammar quirks. It’s investing when I do it, the ads on late night tv invite speculation, and it’s illegal market manipulation when the Hunt brothers do it.
I know the Hunt brothers were trying to corner the market in silver, not gold. I hope you will allow me some license for the sake of the joke.
I would maintain that, unless you’re a jeweler or similar, it’s not actually possible to invest in gold. An investment is something that you buy with the hope and reasonable expectation that its value will increase, or that it will generate value elsewhere, so that you’ll eventually turn a profit. For instance, a company might invest in factory machines, because over their lifespan, those machines will produce valuable products. A real estate developer might invest in land, and then build on it or otherwise increase its value. An individual might buy a house, whose value after a lifetime probably isn’t much different than its original value, but meanwhile you’ve gotten the value of a lifetime of having a roof over your head.
But there is no reasonable expectation that the value of gold will increase. It can, but it can also decrease, and it’s random, and there’s no reason to expect any particular long-term trend. It can be a store of value, and a hedge, in that you can reasonably expect that it’ll keep the same value, on average (averaged over all possible futures), but that’s not the same as an investment. Now, a jeweler who buys gold does have the reasonable expectation that it’ll increase in value, because the jeweler will make it into pretty jewelry, that’s hopefully worth more due to its prettiness than its material value, but that’s not the typical case.
Or, to use the biblical example (funny, how much overlap there is between those who favor gold and those who claim that the Bible should guide all aspects of life): The wise servants who used their ten and five talents to buy stakes in businesses, invested it. The foolish servant who buried his one talent in the ground did not.
It’s all Scrooge McDuck’s fault.
Gold along with plenty of other investments is expected to increase in value because it usually does. There is a limited supply of refined gold and increasing demand. It costs money to refine more gold also. That is the same reasonable expectation that anything else will increase in value.
A jeweler may invest in gold knowing that it will increase in value by itself, but a jeweler buying gold as raw material to create something of greater value is not investing in gold, they’re investing in their own time and labor.
You’re making a joke, but that is exactly the “child’s impression of wealth” as portrayed in fiction. This character is rich, therefore he has a big pile of money. I think some of the more recent portrayals show the character as an actual captain of industry who runs businesses that do productive things, but the “classic” character is just a duck with a pile of money who has a bunch of rich guy hobbies.
Nicholas Crown does a series of videos about “rich guy vs. really rich guy”. One of them portrays “rich guy” as having millions in the bank (and bragging about it), while “really rich guy” has a huge negative balance, because all of his wealth is productive assets.
And really really rich guy might have negative assets, total, with nothing to his name but a whole lot of debt that’ll never possibly be paid off, but still somehow manages to live the high life.