Took the words outta my mouth
1.Spendy to do that. 2.Government confiscation an issue (1933). 3.All PM's should be in physical possession of the owner.
That's all that needs to be said. Otherwise you send your money to someone who is supposedly buying and holding PMs for you. All they are really buying is paper saying they own PMs. Although we haven't seen instances of fraud in the banking industry in nearly a week (scratch that, Stanford made the paper today), you should take physical possesion. You must of course understand that this can be a little difficult to accomplish. One practical way is with jewelery (usually pay a premium over spot gold or platinum prices for obvious reasons).
Lastly there are security concerns involved when you have large sums of money or metals. My advice is to invest in firearms. Solves two problems really. They are relatively liquid. They will not decrease in value in this political and economic climate. They can be used to procure food, they can be used to deter others from trying to procure the food that you have procurred. Most people who buy and sell firearms do not report the capital gains to the IRS (I'm just sayin').
When I was stationed overseas, all the senior officers in my unit who had been in Viet Nam and had family with them, kept gold either in the form of bullion or jewelery as a way to get their families safely out of country in the event of war. CIA operatives used to wear gold bracelets whose links were of a specific weight. Need to buy your way out of a situation where you don't want to have to shoot your way out? Clip off a link of the bracelet.
If this country slips into a full fledged depression, I think that the firearm would be more practical for putting food on the table (assuming you don't mind hunting and killing animals). I hope it doesn't come to that, but I don't lose much sleep about it.
Before anyone else makes the point that the government could confiscate firearms, I would make the point that until they come to take yours away they will only drive the price up. So you will need to time the market. Looking at this more practically, we cannot even control the population of the city of Chicago from possesing firearms illegally, who really thinks that it would work in places like Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, etc??:uzi:
This is not some pro-gun rant, just simply investment advice for uncertain economic times.