Owning precious metals during hyperinflation?

The precious metals are used during hyperinflation as a store of value. You wouldn't actually sell PMs during hyperinflation, you basically hold through the period until a fiat reset.

If you had $1000 in cash and $1000 in PMs one day during hyperinflation. In a year that $1000 in cash would have only a fraction of its purchasing power left whereas the PMs would have "stored" the value of $1000 cash a year ago.

I have answered this question here before, but I would be delighted to answer it again for you.

Unfortunately, we have a real world example of this hyper-inflation happening in Zimbabwe recently.

There, the villagers cannot use Zimbabwe dolalrs to buy their food. They must have gold. They have to go down to the local rivers and pan for it all day long to buy thier bread, rice, soap, etc. That is all that is accepted in terms of money there.

If you are not physically able to go pan for gold, somebody else must pan for you. Otherwise, you die.

One villager says "If you want to buy bread, you need gold, if you want to buy rice, you need gold, if you want soap, gold. Gold, gold, gold."

[link to www.youtube.com]

Reality check:

Gold isn't as valuables as people believe it to be.

Its the worthless currency that makes it seem expensive as it takes more of the increasingly worthless paper to buy and product.

I'm afraid people who use this strategy may end up starving to death as very much "rich" people.

It may be used as in a barter system for food or anything as it has been before even in times when it was normal for people to be starving to death it still had value and helped keep those who owned it alive.

If things do get so bad that no one will want it then you will probably not want to live too long anyway.

However even if things go that bad in time the situation will start to normalize for those who are still alive and gold will then be used as a store of value once again...

Obviously, one must have a supply of food, gas, lead.....THEN go to PMs.

I never heard that before, interesting. Would be possible to match the amount being sold to the exact value of each piece of gold? And wouldn't it be too much of a burden to check to make sure each and every piece of gold is real before each sale could be made?

I don't know how all that would work in reality.

If it weren't for Fukushima and the other 400+ nuclear plants all over the world, I may agree with you on that.

I would go and study Germany before they went into hyperinflation and then their mark went boom. Study before and after who did the best, from what I read it was country people who raise their own food, it is better than bark off trees.

And, determining the actual value of a piece of gold takes expertise, I'm not buying this story without research, it's too illogical.

OK - well if you have enough time to post this question, again, you have enough time to watch the first thirty seconds of the video where the bread merchants roll up in their truck and weigh the gold fragments that were panned from the river. They have a little electronic scale with them.

Do you see?

It's common sense to me. Food and water will be the most valuable things during hyperinflation.

OP why don't you buy "non-precious" metals that are always in demand? Like metalworking files. Everybody needs those. Imagine if you had a few thousand yuans worth of mill bastard files, after hyperinflation, you would have

ONE! MILLION! YUAN!

Youtube is blocked here, I'll take your word for it. Still, if I were a merchant I would accept legal tender over a piece of gold because again you need expertise to know whether it's real and the true value of it then you have to match what's being bought to the exact value of the gold.

Every transaction would become a huge process that could be explosive if both sides didn't agree.

You're gonna tell me that's gonna work? The merchants would probably spend so much time on the technical details of the trade, they wouldn't be able to make a profit no matter how customers were waiting.

I would just invest directly in food and other necessities.

Here's an interesting thought: What could be among the most prized possessions after TSHF? Tampons, cigarettes, toilet paper, toothpaste

Now, that makes sense to me. Even if no one wants to barter with me, I can use that stuff myself.

Medicines, perhaps herbs for health issues would be very prized in a long term SHTF scenario.

im tellin ya, METALWORKING FILES. everybody needs them, they just don't know yet!

The people selling the bread quickly weigh out 0.1 gram of gold for each loaf of bread. They charge four times the going rate for gold. This is how they make lots of money off the situation.

Thanks for reading my posts. Figured out nucler plant angle while at Whataburger.

Or maybe Evetts BBQ

How do they know if the gold is real? How do they know the true value of it as not all is equal?

Assuming they have the expertise to do the above, it's a time-consuming process each and every time.

It would make the bread lines so slow that even wealthy people waiting in line may not get their bread before closing time.

Remember, you can't have an unskilled person at the cash register like you can fiat currency, each person at the cash register has to have expertise and experience evaluating gold...

Do you think those people are everywhere?

I don't see how any of that is feasible at all.

For people who want to read more about that "angle", there's more here:

Thread: Radcon 5 alert in New Jersey

It takes highly trained, skilled, knowledgeable people to run nuclear plants. There are over 100 nuclear plants in the USA.

What could end up happening, due to the jet stream, is that some of the nuclear power plants in the USA will be undermanned due to illness and death before Fukushima Daiichi even needs to be evacuated.

We could end up with nuclear plants breaking down because there aren't enough people with the skills and knowledge to man them.

I picture mass death in the cities when society collapses for two main reasons:

1. Mass death and illness that's radiation related will lead to mass death and illness that's not radiation related due to things like starvation

2. People losing their will to do menial jobs when they know their lives could be over quickly

At that point everything falls apart, there won't be enough food in the cities when basically no one's manufacturing and delivering the food. Even if people ARE manufacturing and trying to deliver the food, it will be an environment where people are stealing the delivery trucks so they can eat the food on the trucks, forget about it getting to the cities.

Could it be that at point everybody throws in the towel together and says, "Let's make the most of the short time we have left" and then on the other hand when there's not enough food everyone will spend their time scrounging for food or hunting for it.

In that environment, the power plants still have to be manned, how is that gonna be done?

Even if you have a perfect plan like making the power plants the first priority and paying the people in the plants top dollar, these people could fall ill or die at any moment...and replacements will be nearly impossible to find.

And that's just one relatively small aspect of this.

I don't understand your points at all. They do business with the same people every day. If somebody is caught passing off fake gold in that environment, I am sure they would be back the next day with some guns and kill the person who cheated them. It is the wild west. Instant street justice.

On the video you would see how quickly they weigh it out on their electronic scales.

Lucky nobody is smart enough to figure out that they should run away after pulling their fake gold scam! Instant street justice the next day, works every time!

Since the world has been using gold to trade for thousands of years, it's amazing that you are just coming up with all these theoretical problems about trading with gold now, like, after the thousands of years it has been used.

After reading your comments, I am starting to think you are right - using gold to trade cannot ever, nor has it ever, worked.

You guys are really on the ball! Good catch!

I wouldn't worry to much OP , see the plan is after the collapse to only have around 496 million caucasions and 4 million light skinned japanese girls with big tits.

See your problem is solved

I bet 300 years ago people were sitting around arguing that paper money could never work, because all someone would need is a printing press and they could counterfeit all the money they wanted to... ha ha

FAIL

You're talking about doing trade in a hyperinflationary environment or after TSHF. Things will be different than how they were during most of history, obviously.

Another problem that will be huge for gold investors who are trying to use their gold for trade: how do you take coins and bars and cut them into exactly the right pieces to buy the theoretical bread?

Your arguments are lame, you can't compare almost anything in history to hyperinflation or TSHF in today's world.

Your logic lacking, I never said gold can't work as money, I said that in the environment we're discussing it wouldn't work WELL.

What would accept during hyper inflation for your real-estate dollars worth .0001 cent or PMs.