If you have come this far you already know that modern currency represents no good: it is paper backed by a government’s promise, and governments break that promise by issuing more.
Knowing that, the common-sense question is: what do you save in?
The oldest answer is gold and silver. Not because they are pretty, but because they have worked as money for thousands of years in almost every culture, and they still do today, whatever government you have.
What happens when a currency dies
Germany in 1923, Zimbabwe in 2008, Venezuela in the last decade. The pattern repeats: the government currency collapses, people stop accepting it and take refuge in foreign currencies, gold and silver. In November 2008, in Zimbabwe, prices were doubling every 24.7 hours.
Why gold
Gold pays no dividends and makes no profits. It is not a company that grows. It does one thing: keep purchasing power over time. It has no debts, no board of directors, and it cannot go bust. Its price swings, sometimes a lot, but its existence is not in question.
And look at who buys it. Central banks, the same ones that say gold is a relic of the past, have been net buyers of gold every year since 2010, according to the World Gold Council.
Why silver
Silver has the same monetary properties as gold and an important industrial use on top: solar panels, electronics, medicine. It moves more than gold, up and down. If gold is pure defence, silver is defence with some attack.
How to buy them
You do not need to keep bars at home, though having some physical metal does no harm. The most practical way is a physically backed ETC: a product listed on the stock exchange that buys the real metal and keeps it in a vault in your name. What I avoid are synthetic products, which track the price without the metal behind them: in a crisis, exactly when you need them, they depend on the bank that signed the contract delivering.
These positions are not there to make you rich quickly. They are there so that, when everything else falls, part of your wealth holds up.
Next: Module 8. Bitcoin. Course contents.