John I remember well those discussions about Cyprus and financial things back when intelligent discussions could be had on here.

Gold remains popular to those who don't want to see their lifetime of work evaporated away by the crooks in charge. Your entire life is represented by your labor and it's value. You trade time and energy for payment in fiat dollars. When you are young and strong you can easily do hard work and get paid in fiat. A sound financial system would mean that those dollars saved while young and strong would buy the same amount of goods and services when you are older and don't want to work as hard and long. Actually those funds should buy you more as the trend should always be towards mild deflation due to natural gains in efficiency and technological advancements.

Something I posted before.

The whole point is to have something outside of worthless fiat currency to trade in whether it's seashells, tally sticks, booze, smokes,bullets, skills or whatever 2 people can agree on. The ounce of gold/silver just makes for a convenient "unit" that most folks can easily comprehend and understand. 

It's not really about "investing" and worrying what the fiat price of a metal is at any particular instant in time. It's about insurance and having options when things fall apart.

It's not even entirely about being able to trade or convert in a crisis.  It's about being able to "transport" savings or value from a failed system to whatever follows this mess when it crashes. Maybe that is tomorrow , next week, next year or 100 years from now.

Maybe I'm wrong but I'm not pushing a newsletter or fund here I'm only trying to discuss and make people think. Everyone is free to discount these words as hokum and do whatever they think is best. I'm only a farmer but I've read and studied history and human nature NEVER changes.

 This thread from years ago was a very good discussion with lots of opinions and views from people far sharper than me. It's one of the many high quality conversations that we have had on NAT on many important economic matters. It's long but worth the read.

http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=515554