Physical cash that buys less and less with each passing day is not as useful, though.
The “real” gold and silver people use it to avoid taxation. The high spreads and illiquidity are less than what you owe the tax guy or your ex-wife.
An important caveat: this only applies to reasonably large orders, 1 oz or larger. You cannot buy $100 of gold with 1% spread.
For this reason alone lots of the extremely wealthy hold it as a hedge.
At volume the premium over spot is about ~6% even straight from the Royal Mint
Example: https://www.royalmint.com/invest/bullion/bullion-coins/gold-...
Gold doesn't multiply itself so that you have more gold that might be unreported. It's not like an investment account in the Caymans. It's just a collectible. You can also buy rare books, or antique furniture, or rubies, or any other collectible. There is absolutely nothing special about gold that doesn't equally apply to these other items, other than gold is more famous.
People who have businesses that are easy to run in cash (landlords, construction, restaurant trades) often run a portion of the business off book. Converting cash to commodities is a pretty common way to store value more securely, as cash gets unwieldy. Sometimes country folk use equipment like tractors or junk cars for similar purposes.
They’ll issue you an invoice made out to walk in or whatever, so you have documentation, and if you want, you can pay taxes on gains or whatever later.
It IS getting harder to get cash out of a bank without jumping through endless hoops, but most banks will still let you call in an order for $20k cash or whatever (more than $100k starts to become much more difficult) and after a few days will have it ready for you with documentation (so if a cop pulls you over you can prove it is documented/part of a ‘legal’ source).
Some will make you sign a waiver so if you get mugged outside the bank, you were warned and it’s not their fault, etc. at some point it’s probably worthwhile to get an armored truck or whatever.
Which the cop will promptly ignore and take the money anyway.
You do have enough lawyers right?
The department has an army of lawyers who deal with civil asset forfeiture all the time, and they can call in federal assistance if needed. There's a 95% chance the department will keep all of the cash, and in the other 5% they merely keep some of it.
Paperwork won't help because the prosecutors will successfully argue that it could be used for future crimes.
Civil asset forfeiture makes a mockery of the US legal system, but most people don't follow it enough to see just how bad it really is.
Someone’s gonna lose their job over that, at least if you have enough lawyers
Where civil asset forfeiture comes in hard core is when you can’t show the source of the money.
Show me a case otherwise.
Where the civil asset forfeiture stuff really gets people is when they don’t have a paper trail.
I really want to believe things are not that bad in the US.
Some are really good, some are…… really not.
And it’s hard to predict what you’ll get unless you really know the area.
Plenty of reputable shops, and most are more than happy to do cash transactions.
So if you decide to flee the country, five pounds of gold is $150K and can easily be carried in a small backpack. Let's say you keep it in 1 troy oz pieces, so you have 80 of them worth about $1800 each. You can go to any nation on earth, and whatever currency they have, they will be happy to sell it to you for gold. Yes, only in $1800 pieces. That's fine, you can exchange it for whatever local currency is being used as you need it.
You can do this anonymously and privately. You don't need to worry about whether the US dollar has collapsed. Gold does go up and down, but it never goes to zero, and tends to do well in crisis situations and maintain value over the long term. It is not - or shouldn't be viewed as -- an "investment", it's insurance. It costs money.
Moreover even if you do not flee the country, having assets that you possess - true bearer assets -- is superior than assets others hold for you in a custodial account. How secure is your 401K? Secure until congress passes a law to take some of it. How secure is your bank account? It is as secure as someone who can convince the bank to freeze your account or close your account. So having a bit of gold or cash as a type of hedge for unlikely events makes sense to a lot of people.
You have to keep in mind that for a household living in Silesia, between 1880 and 2000, they would have lived through one hyperinflation, two world wars, two revolutions and three uprisings, and four foreign invasions. They would have been ruled by Prussia, Poland, Nazi Germany, Soviet-controlled Poland, finally free Poland. Each of these had their own currency regimes and currency reforms. That household would have been well off having a bit of gold tucked away. They would have been able to trade some of it for food during the Weimar collapse, and to transport some wealth through the dark days of communism -- maybe even bribing someone to let them escape the country with something more useful that worthless zlotys in whichever nation they landed.
You're attempting to use logic in a place where there is none.
2) it’s a lot less fun to talk or think (and may be dangerous to even try) about more realistic issues - like if you’re on the wrong side of the situation in Bosnia or Rawanda.
3) it’s the same kind of general process though, and some of the same tools can be useful to defend, escape, or repel.
And gold and diamonds got a LOT of people out of harms way that otherwise would be dead - at least from the 2 folks I knew that got out of Vietnam with their families when the south fell (and are probably alive today) only because they were able to bribe their way onto the boats using gold.
Think Argentine 90's hyper-inflation crisis. Think Venezuela economic colapse.
Heck! think Argentina RIGHT NOW.
Most of us prepare for short-term disruptions that are far more likely than hordes of undead roaming the streets. If widespread societal collapse should actually happen, then having a strong local community, and knowing how to co-operate and communicate with one's neighbours is far more important than having enough canned tuna to last to Ragnarok and back. That being said, having survival skills and basic supplies can come in handy in a wide range of situations.
Personally, I'm preparing for more basic things like long power outages, extreme weather and supply chain disruptions. Sure, we got food, fuel and supplies for a few months at home, and it's been very handy during the pandemic, while being snowed in for a week a few winters ago, and when being without power for two days last summer -- I could keep working like any other day, and didn't lose any income.
Yes, that includes some cash. It's been handy a few times when the card terminals at the store wasn't working. Storing large piles of it seems an unnecessary risk, though.
If you think of it however as not needing to be rational, but more or from an evolutionary perspective ‘folks in the past who had similar types of fears and discomfort might have survived prior insane disasters that no one else expected to ever occur’ it might make more sense.
It doesn’t have to be rational. It doesn’t even have to help them survive or be successful most of the time. If it works even a little better and they survive when everyone else died because of their insane paranoia, those genes will propagate.
Romero confirmed the depiction was that of "the revolution", where "the awake" realizes the vast majority is assimilated, but discovers "humanity" inside himself and decides that it is worth fighting to defend it, as the core hidden topic in the original work which provided the inspiration: Richard Matheson's I am Legend.
All of that installed in the social crisis of confusion, incompetence and violence seen as the core aspects of the '60 in the USA.
...Since we are discussing about cash, and surely you wanted to be on topic, I assume you meant to state "ghouls also renounce to privacy", worsening the scenario Romero originally depicted. Well noted.
The writer probably wanted to subtly refer to relevant Danish-American actress S.J. (a cryptic critique of the frugal accomplished Northern Europe?) in her statement "If I pay bucks for a movie ticket, I do not want to go there and think" (quoted from memory). Too subtle, let us not speak in riddles! (Even that «transphobia», presumably to be read as "fear of [monetary] transactions" - privacy, availability, inflation, currency as a token without intrinsic value: with such obscurity, little of the message can pass.)
Which gave way to IOUs from gold smiths, since carrying large amounts of coins was still hard. Which, well, everyone knows the rest.
Doing this kind of thing has meant their ancestors survived crazy insane disasters that most others did not, so they are going to keep doing it to some extent no matter what.
Think of it as humanities extra parity bits. Most of the time they’re useless, until they’re the only reason we’re still here.
Might loose a bit to fees getting it on chain(s) (though less than intl money transfers if one is used to that), but should make it back pretty quickly.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/walmart-allowing-some-shopp...
[1] https://github.com/bisq-network/bisq
In the event of hyperinflation the Bitcoin will hopefully gain (or at least preserve value)-- and it can be transferred online, which the cash cannot. (And in the event of a total bitcoin collapse you still have 90%). Re-balance it once a year or so.
It doesn't take much to make missing out on the 0.5% interest rate of a high rate savings account into not much of a problem.