Gold

Not how I look at it. Historically--and it is almost the entire history of mankind--physical gold has been one of the best forms of protection against sovereigns debasing fiat currencies.

For example, this (United States):



And this (Japan):



And this (Eurozone):



What you see for the last few decades on those graphs has led to economic upheaval. ... massive monetary inflation, feeding more and more debt creation, leading to a series of bubbles which popped causing economic upheaval. When the cost of money is left to a market, risk gets calibrated by the market participants. But because the cost of money has been recklessly price fixed to make it cheaper and cheaper -- it has made its way into riskier and riskier places.

With each bubble bursting, the response has been more monetary inflation, rather than allowing a necessary deleveraging to occur -- the way anything that bankrupts itself has to default. It has put the world into a prolonged depression as they try to keep everything on the treadmill. The deleveraging is still going to have to happen -- except the longer it goes on until it can happen, the worse the eventual fall. So, it is going to lead to quite a bit more economic upheaval before the damage the recklessness has caused is fixed.

The world lost all sense of reality and ran up huge amounts of debt -- quite recklessly. And the bureaucrats given control over those currencies have monetized that debt (the only way it could go on) by creating massive monetary inflation. It's an age old story -- and historically it has never ended without a crash and thud.

As long as that is going on, owning gold makes perfect sense. It's not a blind bet. It is a reasoned way to store your savings.

There is going to be a massive deleveraging -- done involuntarily unfortunately. And yeah, it is going to cause economic upheaval. But you are not betting on economic upheaval if you put say 10 or 20 percent of your savings in gold rather than holding a currency whose value is being intentionally destroyed on you. Any more than you are betting on a hurricane if you buy home owners insurance. It's a matter of protecting yourself, not speculating blindly on something. In this case, it's not just a typical insurance policy, because the conditions for the catastrophic event have already been created. You have been watching it happen. Anyone with their eyes open and an understanding of what money actually is, has watched it happening. Unfortunately, that doesn't include most people. ... which is why it happened.