| I always think of it in disaster tiers. Market slowdown, you'll want your bonds. Recession, you'll want your cash. Depression, you'll want gold and barterable goods. Economic collapse or apocalypse, you'll want food, medicine, and alcohol (possibly the most barterable good, also delicious). In any case anybody reading this in a major city faces non zero likelihood of disaster (take your pick for your city, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, terrorist attack, war) and should be stockpiling 3 liters of water per person in the house per day you want to be able to survive on your own, alongside 2k calories of food, trash bags, etc. I say have a stocked liquor cabinet as well because my experience in Backcountry many week hikes has taught me you can get nearly anything in return for good liquor :) I've also heard strong arguments for the stockpiling of pornography and certain chemicals that are valuable in tbe production of medicine or just used as general reagents, don't know too much about chemical stockpiling though. Careful for the prepper rabbit hole, it runs so very deep ;) |
However after this winter's experience where two feet of snow ran the supermarkets out of fresh food, I'm going to keep slightly more food and folding money on hand.
But remember these are long-term processes. Ultimately your connections and community will become important in economic collapses, because they're usually very slow-motion.