If you’re a billionaire, then putting some gold aside in your bunker is no big deal. Even if it ends up costing many millions. Who cares? You’ve got more where that came from. It’s reasonably likely it will be useful as currency when things settle down, so stockpile it now while it’s easy. If it never is useful, again, so what? It’s not like buying $10 million in gold kept you from also buying things important for short term survival. Diversification and all that.
For someone with less means, buying gold instead of other survival gear is probably a bad idea for all the reasons stated up thread.
Sure, but the suggestion that somebody could easily carry their net worth in gold in their pockets is one of those questionable ideas. Pocket space is valuable in survival situations. Maybe more valuable in the short term than whatever that gold may be worth in some unknowable future
No, I’m just trying to point out that virtually no one is going to have any trouble lugging around their net worth in terms of gold. Silver would be a different matter, in Europe during the 2.0 war silver started trading at a significant discount, because anybody with significant wealth didn’t want it when trying to unass themselves to another country with little more than the clothes on their back.
Don’t need pockets to carry gold. Loop chains around your neck, spring arm rings onto your biceps. You could treat it like hacksilver: break off a chain link or cut a slice off your arm ring to pay for something, the way the Vikings did.
I mean, obviously. The amount of gold will remain the same, while the number of people will drop to a fraction of what it once was. Of course the value of gold will drop.
Plus, after the survivors loot the bodies, everyone will have all the gold jewelry they could possibly want.
Mark Zuckerberg and people like him are billionaires because they came up with a good idea they were able to monetize into a billion dollar enterprise in a country that provides them the legal and infrastructural framework to securely do so. It is absurd to believe Zuckerberg would be able to seamlessly transfer those skills and experience into becoming a post-apocalyptic warlord in a world with no electricity.
Zuckerberg has a lot of “stuff”. What do his henchmen need him for? Maybe they decide that in the new world, their head of security who spent several combat tours in Afghanistan as a special forces operator is in a better position to provide for their future than Zuckerberg and his stock options and vision for the future of virtual reality?
Lot of people who aren’t billionaires or millionaires have a lot of experience leading and inspiring people under extreme conditions.
No one is going to keep following Jim, Executive VP of Marketing for North America because he has an MBA from Harvard and was their direct manager before the apocalypse.
You mean physically carrying it around? There are plenty of people that have their house paid off and good retirement funds. For those folks you’re talking 100lbs or so. Does not go in a pocket.
Doesn’t really matter though. Your net worth will be how much food you have a a decent shelter.
That’s still assuming prices are stable. A solid house is still a house, i.e. it provides a roof and potentially a warm place to sleep. At a minimum, a place out of the wind and rain. Until there is some semblance of a functional society, gold is shiny metal that you carry around hoping it will someday be worth something to somebody else.
In the immediate aftermath of a collapse, a house becomes more valuable than a thousand pounds of gold. After a while, maybe things settle down to the point where trade starts up again and things are no longer valued for their immediate use.
Wearing it is also not a great idea for a similar reason - open display of wealth in a society without functional law enforcement? Maybe you can do that if you’re Lord Skullcrusher with arms the size of small children. And again in the immediate aftermath, what does a necklace or even a large armlet buy you? A loaf of bread? Less?
The assumption seems to be that there’s a lot of civilization left over after the collapse. At least enough for gold to hold its value and enough security to have minimal worries about random banditry.
If civilization exists, they’ll have banks and taxes, and they’ll be printing money. That’s what civilizations do. It’s not like humanity will forget all the progress it made and revert back to the 11th Century, after all. People will want to rebuild.
Most people. “Not very many” is not “plenty” perhaps? See where I’m going with that? If I must have wrote that in error, Mea Culpa.
I thought I read a lot of people can’t even scrape up $500. I think the point stands. This would be a data point where “average” isn’t going to work. A 400oz “good delivery bar, about the size of a small brick - is easily worth $800,000 at todays price. It would fit in the center console of your car, and makes a dandy paperweight I bet!
The paradox is that the people best able to prepare for the collapse of civilization are people who would be out of work afterwards. To a first order of approximation there will be just two jobs in the absence of civilization: farmer and warlord.
Well, but warlords need troops, which need trainers, quartermasters, support staff, also household staff to maintain the fortresses, blacksmiths to make shoes for the warhorses, weapons, and farming implements, tanners to process hides into leather, cobblers, weavers, bakers, millers, carpenters, masons, physicians, midwives, etc.etc.etc.
I mean, your local warlord can’t just send a minion down to Warlords R Us to pick up a new shipment of armor.
