I am not completely sure my true intention of holding physical gold and silver because a combination farmlands, livestocks, and stocks in food producers and grocers would be a better bet for the hard time that physical silvers and golds would be of actual use. Otherwise, a regular roitine recession may be best countered with just holding indexes and few businesses with more resistance to recessions.
You'll need to think about specific scenarios where physical PMs would be helpful, and then backtest them against analogous events across history and geography. IMO, the use case for physical PMs is extremely limited.
First, physical PMs are dead weight in the event of a routine recession. They cannot be economically bought or sold, so they do not deliver the benefits of rebalancing to a portfolio. I.e. If stocks drop 50% and gold goes up 10% you cannot rebalance your asset allocation without taking a massive haircut from some dealer or pawn shop. Therefore the argument that a small PM allocation would have improved portfolio performance in historical cohorts (using spot prices) does not apply to physical metal, because virtually any reasonable amount of gains would have been eaten up by transaction costs.
Second, in the vast majority of breakdown-of-society situations throughout history, you'd have been better off emigrating rather than trying to live off of physical assets like land, guns, PM's, and canned goods. Imagine yourself in Venezuela, Hati, Somalia, Yemen, Nepal, Zimbabwe, Mali, or Uyghur China trying to make this strategy work for 5-10 years. Could it work in these places? Or would you advise yourself in these situations to leave the physical assets behind and find peace/prosperity elsewhere?
Third, even in many "bad times" situations, financial markets survive and property rights are usually respected. The London Stock Exchange functioned throughout the World War 2 bombing of London - with only a one week closure due to shrapnel and falling buildings, while the German stock exchange actually gained as Hitler rolled across Europe. The French exchange actually resumed trading through German occupation and liberation by the Allies. Exchanges did permanently close during WW2, particularly in places like Warsaw or Romania that were overrun by Nazis and then Communists. Exchanges survived cataclysmic events in an era when communication and record keeping was done on paper and in physical locations. Today, only a tiny fraction of volume is traded by shouting people on the archaic stock exchange floors. So in a nutshell, an idea that "paper gold" assets like GLD or IAU would be inaccessible or that a loss of property rights could occur would have to also involve the United States being overrun by another country, having a Soviet-style civil war and communist revolution, or a nuclear war.
In those same scenarios, it would be exceedingly hard to maintain control over one's physical possessions. Who guarantees you own your land if there is no government to enforce property rights? What would stop the roving army/militants of whatever scenario from looting everything you own?
It's almost always a better idea to flee than to try to make the best of an unworkable situation, whether the problems are due to military activity, anarchy, or radiation.
Think about the Eastern Ukranian farmers who stayed with their land. Now they are under shelling and drone attacks, surrounded by landmines, looted, raped, and perhaps conscripted by the Russian soldiers, and with no economic prospects for miles around. The ones who left their physical assets behind are now working in Western Ukraine or other European countries, finding a measure of success and often sending money to support their home country.
So IMO the best insurance against a collapse of civilization would be:
- a passport with plenty of time left on it,
- the ability to speak a 2nd or 3rd language,
- skills that would be sought-after by foreign governments,
- enough liquid assets to pay lawyer bills and avoid imprisonment or deportation,
- accounts in foreign banks, with the ability to transfer assets to those banks and withdraw from them once you arrive,
- NOT owning a bunch of non-portable assets like real estate, cars, businesses, etc. because the prospect of losing these will persuade you to stay until it is too late to leave. Also, if you have a family, an ability to make a bold decision and travel together rather than fighting about it.
If you think about the holocaust targets who managed to escape death, for example, most tended to have enough liquid wealth and intellectual wealth to buy their way out of Europe (fees, tickets, bribes, foreign languages, wartime-applicable skills, ability to adapt to different cultures, etc). The survivors who stayed regretted it, lost more family members, and experienced more trauma and deprivation.
In the modern era, Russians are a good example. Those with wealth quickly set up foreign accounts in tax havens like Switzerland, Malta, or Cyprus, bought houses in places like London or Vancouver, and quietly slipped away as Vladimir Putin's totalitarian regime replaced democracy in the 21st century. Russians living in Western Europe may face hate, banking restrictions, and visa issues. But do you know what troubles they are not facing? They're not among the hundreds of thousands getting blown up by drones and artillery in meat assaults, and they are not starving/freezing in Siberian gulags either. They got out before it was too late, left behind family, friends, and physical property, and survived. They offer a valuable lesson IMO, and I've never heard a story of anyone smuggling gold out of Russia.
