In the immediate aftermath of a serious Mad Max level disaster (asteroid, megavolcano, nuclear war, etc), sure. Having supplies on hand to last from 2 weeks to a month to ride out the short term disruption of a disaster is just smart.
A few weeks out? You're going to have a market where gold is going to be the easy baseline, because doing 100% barter is a pain in the ass. Hence the emergence of trading shiny bits of metal as a proxy for wheat and goats eons ago. The natural properties of the metal happen to be really good for this - it's easily cut/worked, impervious to all but the most intentional chemical attack, difficult to counterfeit, easy to assay, and rare.
What's a case of 5.56 worth now, like around $1000? And it weighs like what, 15lb?
That's probably the most value-dense utility thing people are hoarding. Preserved food is mostly either water or air so you're looking at a pallet of food being worth maybe 2-4 cases of 5.56. Fuel is inconvenient and a bit dangerous to handle as a commodity so we'll consider any gas/diesel/oil/LP to be out of the picture as a bartering item.
Now consider gold, absent of any government interference in its market, has held pretty much the same purchasing power for millennia, and a 1oz bar of it will almost certainly be worth around a case or two of ammo or pallet of preserved food. This is just basic emergent markets, it's what people naturally do when left to their own devices (aka "a free market").
I think your timeline might be a little off. First off, in a situation like you're describing--a disaster that causes complete economic collapse--it's going to take more than a few months to get regular crops going again. There will be areas where food is plentiful. Your gold and silver economy works fine there. But there'll also be areas where, for whatever reason, the local farmers mostly died off. Or their farming equipment doesn't work anymore, and no one knows how to repair it because the manufacturer kept their hardware and software proprietary. Or their crops were dependent on shipments of specialized fertilizer because they were genetically engineered. Situations like that are going to be widespread, and if you're stuck in an area where that's the case, your gold and silver will be worth exactly what it is--rocks--because no one will be willing to part with their food stores.
Even in the case of a truly sci-fi disaster like the nitrogen-eating blight in "Interstellar" there's still going to be trade and economics happening after the initial shock.
It makes absolutely zero sense to barter bulk commodities when there's a pretty universally agreed on "valuable metal" that can serve as a fairly secure proxy.
Even just from an energy standpoint gold makes sense. Why bring 4 cases of ammo for 2 pallets for food, at your fuel cost to move it, when you can bring a jeans pocket worth of gold.
You have to survive the 2-3 years of devastating famine to get to the point where barter is even an option. Like I said, you're not exactly wrong, but your timetable is way too optimistic.
At a certain level of disaster I don't even really think in terms of any of this mattering, and what you're describing is like "we got hit by an asteroid and it was dinosaur killer tier". It's so far out of anything even plannable I don't even consider it. If you or yours survive it you might be a dominant gene line in the future - but you're probably not gonna survive it.
So like "prep to live in a hole for 2-3 years until the zombies/ash/salted bomb fallout subsides" is to me kinda laughable, it's the stretchiest of stretch goals.
On the other hand, a month of supplies to ride thru a weather disaster, trucker strike, civil unrest, etc is just smart thinking.
In the immediate aftermath of a serious Mad Max level disaster (asteroid, megavolcano, nuclear war, etc), sure. Having supplies on hand to last from 2 weeks to a month to ride out the short term disruption of a disaster is just smart.
A few weeks out? You're going to have a market where gold is going to be the easy baseline, because doing 100% barter is a pain in the ass. Hence the emergence of trading shiny bits of metal as a proxy for wheat and goats eons ago. The natural properties of the metal happen to be really good for this - it's easily cut/worked, impervious to all but the most intentional chemical attack, difficult to counterfeit, easy to assay, and rare.
What's a case of 5.56 worth now, like around $1000? And it weighs like what, 15lb?
That's probably the most value-dense utility thing people are hoarding. Preserved food is mostly either water or air so you're looking at a pallet of food being worth maybe 2-4 cases of 5.56. Fuel is inconvenient and a bit dangerous to handle as a commodity so we'll consider any gas/diesel/oil/LP to be out of the picture as a bartering item.
Now consider gold, absent of any government interference in its market, has held pretty much the same purchasing power for millennia, and a 1oz bar of it will almost certainly be worth around a case or two of ammo or pallet of preserved food. This is just basic emergent markets, it's what people naturally do when left to their own devices (aka "a free market").
I think your timeline might be a little off. First off, in a situation like you're describing--a disaster that causes complete economic collapse--it's going to take more than a few months to get regular crops going again. There will be areas where food is plentiful. Your gold and silver economy works fine there. But there'll also be areas where, for whatever reason, the local farmers mostly died off. Or their farming equipment doesn't work anymore, and no one knows how to repair it because the manufacturer kept their hardware and software proprietary. Or their crops were dependent on shipments of specialized fertilizer because they were genetically engineered. Situations like that are going to be widespread, and if you're stuck in an area where that's the case, your gold and silver will be worth exactly what it is--rocks--because no one will be willing to part with their food stores.
Even in the case of a truly sci-fi disaster like the nitrogen-eating blight in "Interstellar" there's still going to be trade and economics happening after the initial shock.
It makes absolutely zero sense to barter bulk commodities when there's a pretty universally agreed on "valuable metal" that can serve as a fairly secure proxy.
Even just from an energy standpoint gold makes sense. Why bring 4 cases of ammo for 2 pallets for food, at your fuel cost to move it, when you can bring a jeans pocket worth of gold.
You have to survive the 2-3 years of devastating famine to get to the point where barter is even an option. Like I said, you're not exactly wrong, but your timetable is way too optimistic.
At a certain level of disaster I don't even really think in terms of any of this mattering, and what you're describing is like "we got hit by an asteroid and it was dinosaur killer tier". It's so far out of anything even plannable I don't even consider it. If you or yours survive it you might be a dominant gene line in the future - but you're probably not gonna survive it.
So like "prep to live in a hole for 2-3 years until the zombies/ash/salted bomb fallout subsides" is to me kinda laughable, it's the stretchiest of stretch goals.
On the other hand, a month of supplies to ride thru a weather disaster, trucker strike, civil unrest, etc is just smart thinking.