Gold and silver have a place in preparing yourself for a post-paper money/post-apocalyptic economy, but I wouldn't stake my entire investment portfolio in it. And whatever investment I'd make would be in small enough pieces to use in trade/barter. I remember gold at $32/oz, because the dollar was still tied to gold. In the 1960s, France under Charles De Gaul began divesting itself of dollars and exchanging them for gold bullion. In 1971, then president Nixon put a stop to the convertibility of exchanging dollars for gold bullion on the U.S. market as an attempt to prevent the depletion of the U.S. gold treasury at Fort Knox. But, this had the unintended (at least publicly so) consequence of effectively de-linking the value of the U.S. dollar from the quantity of gold at Fort Knox. Ever since then, the dollar is worth whatever the U.S. government says it's worth......even though the market usually disagrees.
The correct response would have been to simply refuse to sell France our gold in exchange for U.S. dollars, and instead force France to get rid of their dollars by buying U.S. military technology or other products.........which would have been much more Chinese in strategy. But Nixon was a fool.
