I have a some­what skewed view of pre­cious met­als. I believe that in a post SHTF sit­u­a­tion peo­ple will not just turn to pre­cious met­als as cur­ren­cy.  The aver­age per­son will raid their change jar and use what­ev­er cash they have on hand to pay for goods until they run out of that fiat cur­ren­cy.  They have no choice. It’s all they know.  Addi­tion­al­ly, being a fiat cur­ren­cy, it’s worth­less (the US Dol­lar), backed by noth­ing, and it’s val­ue is clear­ly only per­ceived after the SHTF. They’ll use what they have until what they have is gone, and then they get des­per­ate or get smart about what they have in their per­son­al inven­to­ry; alco­hol (beer, wine, & liquor), fuel, food, ammo, soap, jew­el­ry, etc… It becomes their cur­ren­cy.

Pre­cious Met­als… What are they worth? Real­ly? My view is that they’re worth very lit­tle until you come across some­one else post SHTF that has use for them. Then and only then is their per­ceived val­ue real­ized. Sure they’re worth some­thing while the mar­kets are up and run­ning, when you buy them, when you sell them, etc. But how valu­able do they become post mar­ket val­ue if the grid is down? The mar­kets of course fluc­tu­ate and the val­ue of the pre­cious met­als fluc­tu­ate with it, whether organ­i­cal­ly, propped up, or arti­fi­cial­ly sup­pressed. I believe pre­cious met­als become more valu­able to those that are pre­pared to use them, have them, and have resources to barter and trade for. Oth­er­wise, pre­cious met­als are worth­less, with the caveat that if some­one on the out­side sees them being used to sell or pro­cure resources, they will real­ize val­ue in their minds. They will sud­den­ly need some sil­ver, gold, plat­inum, cop­per, or what­ev­er is being used as the cur­ren­cy of choice.

So what does this mean?  I believe it means that unless you know any­one else who has the same belief as you about pre­cious met­als as cur­ren­cy they are pret­ty worth­less.  Those that don’t have them pre-SHTF may not see the val­ue in them when you need to use them.  I believe you have to have a net­work of peo­ple that plan on procur­ing, stor­ing, using, and bar­ter­ing with them when the time to do is made appar­ent.  I also feel that in order for this to hap­pen, you’ll need to be in a sit­u­a­tion where you have to have a rela­tion­ship with, and are in rel­a­tive­ly close prox­im­i­ty to those that feel the same as you.  That is not to say that pop-up mer­chants, mer­chants on main street Amer­i­ca, etc. won’t even­tu­al­ly see the val­ue in using them.  In fact, I am pret­ty sure that is an inevitabil­i­ty that they will see it as high val­ue.  I also make the assump­tion that those same mer­chants will take any con­sum­able that has per­ceived val­ue as cur­ren­cy as well.

What are your thoughts?