Will Gold be worthless in the future?

Of course not. Thought you stackers might enjoy this Twilight Zone episode. The Rip Van Winkle Caper

 

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never saw this one thanks for sharing. it is scary to think of the future when gold will mean nothing and food and water will be the barter system. food for thought.

 

I use to tell folks edited, see rules on language invest in copper or steel plated lead.

 

In a real emergency , with a total breakdown of the government the most valuable things will be seeds , food and water , medicines and of course bullets , guns . Anything useful for survival . Of course a nice air conditioned battle tank would be worth a good buck especially in a zombie apocalypse .

 

Very true. Guns will be the new gold and bullets will be the new silver. The air conditioned zombie apocalypse tank will replace the demand for platinum.

 

Ask yourself if gold has ever been worthless in the last 6,000 years?

I have gradually come to agree that guns and ammo will also become another form of "money," but I am baffled as to what the exchange rate might be. It's one thing to stack silver, but another to put away guns (with ammo and sights) at $500-1000+ per pop.

Plus, once your "stash" contains a lot of guns, you can't go anywhere. Military road checkpoints will confiscate your guns, plus the immense weight and volume, but.....they're not likely to find $10,000 worth of gold. But they may confiscate your entire car, food, luggage, and girlfriend.

At that point, life's not worth living anyway.

The really really BIG problem for persons of any age -- will be prescription medicines. If you take something critical, you'll be dead in a month. And if you find a way to hoard meds, the shelf life is seldom more than a year, so you only postpone the inevitable. It's a grim reality.

 

Even the thought of this makes Goldmember angry...lol.

 

Slow down. 6,000 years don't matter. Watch the last couple minutes of the episode.

 

I wrote my post before the video was put up, and I don't have time to watch a video, so I'll take your word for it. Whatever.

Some of the clueless stock market touts email me videos with 30 seconds of useful info, and 20 minutes of clumsy confusing blather. ALL are "deletes" on sight.

IMO, videos are the absolute WORST way to get somebody to buy, subscribe, reply, etc., etc.

 

Btw Doug, yes, gold has been nearly valueless in many, many cultures in the last 6,000 years. Placing a high value on gold is a LEARNED trait. The Mesopatamians and Assyrians started using it for their priesthood garb, and the rich followed suit. Then these cultures "taught" other cultures that gold was valuable since they would trade them a high price for theirs. This was taught to other cultures further away, so on and so forth. The exact same "teaching" was done with jade in the orient, but since China was more isolated it did not spread as widely.

Just a pet peeve how so many people think humans innately LOVE gold and wish to own it desperately. Its not that, it was a learned trait. If the same thing would have happened in New Zealand where there were not others to teach of gold's "value" we would be making fun of the natives for valuing such a worthless metal, kind of like how we made fun of many cultures for their own learned traits. The only difference with gold is the center of civilization was the one "teaching" this, and geographically it could access most people.

 

It doesn't matter if the principle were taught - or not. If you follow the timeline, you will find the "learning" ended millennia ago. Anything that inspires and instigates war, famine, religious strife, murder, conspiracy -- the list is virtually endless -- is worth paying attention to. When one gold coin buys 100 times as much as one copper coin, you'd better pay attention to the hole in your pocket.

You are trying to undermine one of the primary cultural values of civilization. If you maintain that people value gold because it's shiny, malleable, and ductile, I'll reply, so is tungsten -- wanna trade? The reality check is simply that gold buys the ultimate needs of individuals. Way down the line, some guy has a warehouse full of food; he would like to benefit for his perspicacity. You say, "Well, what DO you want to trade for your food?" If he's low on guns and ammo, or fuel, or insulin, those might come first. But if you don't have any of those practical necessities, gold will no doubt enter the conversation, especially if he leans toward the optimistic outlook, that "this will pass," and the nation and its strengths will prevail.

 

Didn't mean for this to evolve into a debate about the merits of gold. Just trying to show a less known Twilight Zone episode relevant to the forum. Good thing I didn't include the epsiode with the Pig Faces. It might have upset our future ant overlords.

 

Well, gold's value is arbitrary (take a look at the government-dictated gold:silver ratio of the gold standard era).

 

In which case, Westtexasbound, we should be stacking cans of Raid, not gold and silver...

 

The value of gold in any sort of economic collapse (outside of The Twilight Zone) will be contingent on one thing: Confidence that order will eventually be restored. If one's primary concern is survival, and that person has no confidence that order will be restored, then gold in and of itself will be worthless to that person. However, a person with gold only has to find one person who has something they need who has confidence in the future. For gold to be worthless to all people, well that would have to be one heck of a collapse. One can also look at the future geographically: The odds of a complete disaster that would render gold worthless worldwide is virtually nil, thus if there is any hope that one can get outside the affected area to where gold has value, then gold will still have value in the affected area as well.

Another way to look at this is through Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. "Physiological" (breathing, food, water, sleep, etc.) is the foundation that must be met before moving to the next level. The next level is "Safety", which includes security of resources and property. Gold is relevant in the physiological level because gold can be used to obtain physiological necessities through barter with someone whose physiological needs are met and is concerned about higher level needs, or even just the one physiological need you seek and they might be hopeful that the PM they receive in barter can be used to obtain the other physiological needs they seek.

 

For new member W.Mart (welcome), here is a historical chart of the gold-silver ratio:

 

^ Yes, that illustrates my point. That long period of stability in the gold:silver ratio is the result of governments "fixing" the ratio...thus, the value of gold at the time can be considered arbitrary.

 

Correct, I agree. Go back further in time and you will see more variability than you see from the 17th-19th centuries. Such a stable, "fixed" ratio is an artificial abberation. Too many people only go back in time a few hundred years so they think this is "normal", when in fact it is not.

To me, what is happening is you have wealth being generated in new cultures. These cultures have a high historical value of gold, but not as much for silver, so the free market is reflecting the much higher demand for gold versus silver. The world is not just European economies anymore, as was the case for most of the 17th-19th centuries. My Asian wife wants gold, gold, and more gold. She does not care a wit about owning a single gram of silver. Her and the billions of others like her, is why this ratio between gold and silver is pretty much meaningless today.

 

There is one thing I never really understood; the ratio (in struck coins) seldom reached 16:1 exactly. For instance, circa 1900:

1 double eagle = 0.96750 Troy ounces of gold
80 quarters = 80 x 0.18084 Troy ounces of silver = 14.46 Troy ounces of silver

14.46 divided by 0.96750 = 14.95 ratio

You would have smelting costs on both sides of the equation, so that's not a factor, apparently. Is the difference accounted for, by the value of the copper in both coins?
(i.e., much more copper in a stack of 80 quarters)

 

A stable gold:silver ratio also resulted from the need for a well-defined exchange rate because gold and silver were used for specie currency. That is no longer the case, leaving room for gold to reflect cultural values as you suggest.