What assets would be valuable in a post-apocalyptic scenario?
Gold and silver are for after the crisis, not during.  Gold and silver are far more likely to be able to be exchanged for things you need, since they are rare, easily divided, etc. Getting land away from where the crap is happening is also good, but it's more than that.  Say you have land somewhere.  How will the locals view you if you move there to hunker down only when things go bad?  They won't really trust you, and you'll inherit a new set of problems.  Building relationships in an off-the-beaten-path area requires a time investment. Investing in lifestyle in general is good.  Lifestyle isn't just toys, but it's privacy, peace of mind, relationships with people with whom you can barter skills, as well as the skills you might think you'd need to do more than just get by in whatever scenario you envision. For the immediate crisis, you'd better have the things you'll need for a few months.  Stores probably won't be supplied on any regular basis, and the shelves will be bare.  Trying to use gold or silver during the crisis just makes you a target for theft.  With regard to food, it's best to get acclimated to a diet of what you'd have on hand.  If you get freeze-dried food, eat it now, so that it's not a shock to your system when you have to eat it. (Can you tell I've been thinking about this? :) ) This is going to be a list of some things that will likely be of value immediately after some apocalyptic event.  However, note that I am not answering your question of what you should invest in now to take advantage of such an event.  That is a pretty ridiculous notion.  Preparing oneself for such a possibility is certainly a good idea.  That said, there are some realistic limitations to how you could take advantage of such a situation.  Namely, the very real requirement of physical security.  Unless you have a huge posse -- armed to the teeth -- to defend your cache, someone will come along with a bigger and better armed group to take it.  (Not to mention that I am the type of person that would -- at least -- consider organizing such a group to take you down; if only as a matter of principle.) Guns & ammo (Also, knives; ideally ones that can be used as weapons and for food preparation/hunting.) Alcohol.  Especially liquor.  It's concentrated and easier to store than beer or wine.  Beside for getting inebriated, it is useful as a sedative and antiseptic. Non-perishable foods.  Canned goods are obvious.  Though, grains and cereals can be stored with relative ease under some circumstances.  (Obviously, not so easily done in an urban area.) Methods of starting a fire.  Preferably rugged ones, such as flint and steel.  (Lighters would only be of limited use.  Matches are bulky and require water-tight storage.) Salt and/or salt-licks.  (Possibly, other forms of non-perishable bait.)  As bstpierre puts it, hunting will be about survival not sport. Hand-tools. Textiles, fabrics, thread and needles. Medicines of all sorts, though especially antibiotics, antiseptics and painkillers. Books of a practical nature.  Topics such as: wilderness survival, cooking, carpentry, etc. The list is mostly ordered in terms of value & practicality. Ultimately, I doubt there is much that will provide a practical investment idea for such a scenario.  The physical security issue is a big limiting factor.  In a post-apocalyptic scenario it goes back to who is bigger, stronger and better armed. One thing does come to mind: knowledge.  Prepare yourself with the skills and knowledge you need to survive in such a scenario and you will be invaluable.  Also, as bstpierre notes in the comments, connections will likely also be important.  (Probably local or nearby connections.)  No one person can do it all alone.  It will come down to cooperation. Bullets, canned goods, and farm supplies that don't need gas (e.g. seed, feed, plows). This is a long term investment but can be very useful during tough times. Be prepared not only to take but to give as well. Moreover: I find these type of questions silly, but I'll bite: Guns. Without them, any other conceivable asset would be taken from you. By someone with guns. A book on the power of persuasion. The people will need you to lead them to the glory land like the Deacon* from Waterworld *Dennis Hopper.  Study up. Apocalyptic like MAD MAX, huh? Well, no one so far has mentioned Gasoline, not paper gasoline futures but the real thing in barrels or tankers. Guns, ammo, sure... but if everyone on the ground is shooting each other I'd prefer an ultralight helicopter.  You all have watched MAD MAX, right? On a more serious note, there is a country in the South Pacific that never saw fighting in world war 2 due to its remoteness, but is large and developed enough to be agriculturally pretty much self sufficient, and with a  low population has plenty of space.  Might be good to squirrel away something down there... Barton Biggs's book Wealth, War and Wisdom aims to answer the question of what investments are best-suited to preserving value despite large-scale catastrophes by looking at how various investments and assets performed in countries affected by WWII.  In Japan, stocks and urban land turned out to be good investments; in France, farm land and gold did better. Stocks outperformed bonds in nearly every country.  Phil Greenspun recently wrote a review of the book. Assuming that the financial system broke down, not enough supply of essential commodities or food but there is political and administrative stability and no such chaos that threatens your life by physical attacks.  The best investment would then be some paddy fields, land, some cows, chickens and enough clothing , a safe house to stay and a healthy life style that enables you to work for food and some virtue at heart and management skills to get people work for you on your resources so that they can survive with you (may be you earn some profit -that is up to your moral standards to decide, how much). It all begins to start again; a new Financial System has to be in place….!
Wow, why so defensive?  I'm a bit confused as to what you are arguing exactly. In the first part of your post it seems like you are saying ideas can't have intrinsic value, only physical things. I disagree.  Your second argument seems to be that Bitcoin isn't special. It's just one of many possible implementations of the blockchain idea. You do seem to believe that a blockchain can be valuable though, correct? "The answer to your question depends on what you mean when you say ""growth"".  If you mean a literal increase in the aggregate market capitalization of companies, across the entire market, then, no, this sort of growth is not possible without concomitant economic growth.  The reason why is that the market capitalization of each company is proportional to its gross revenue, and the sum of all revenue from selling ""final goods"" (i.e., things purchased and used by consumers) is, apart from a few technicalities, the definition of GDP.  The exact multiplier might fluctuate up or down depending on investors' expectations about how sales will grow or decline going forward, but in a zero-growth economy this multiplier should be stable over the long run.  It might, however, still fluctuate over the short term, but more about that in a minute.   Note that all of this applies to aggregate growth across all firms.  Individual firms can still grow, of course, but as they must do this by gaining market share from other companies such growth would be balanced by a decline for some other firm.  Also, I've assumed zero net exports (that's one of the ""technicalities"" I mentioned above) because obviously you could have export-driven growth even if the domestic economy were stationary. However, often when people talk about ""growth"" in the market, what they really mean is ""return"".  That is, how much does your investment earn for you.  This isn't really the same thing as growth, but people often think of it that way, particularly in the saving phase of their investing career, when they are reinvesting their returns, and therefore their account balances are growing.  It is possible to have a positive return, averaged across the market, even in a stationary economy.  The reason why is that there are really only two things a firm can do with its net profits.  One possibility is that it could invest it in growing the business.  However, there is not much point in doing that in a stationary economy because by assumption no increase in aggregate consumption (and therefore, in the long run, aggregate production) are possible.  Therefore, firms are left with only the second option, which is to pay them out to investors as dividends.  Those dividends provide a return that is independent of economic growth. Would the stock market still be a good investment in such an economy?  Yes.  Well, sort of.  The rate of return from firms' dividend payouts will depend on investors' demand (in aggregate) for returns on their investments.  Stock prices will rise or fall, causing returns to respectively fall or rise, to find that level.  If your personal desire for returns is lower than the average across the investing public, then the stock market would look like a good investment.  If your desired return is higher than the average, then it will look like a poor investment.  The marginal investor will, of course be indifferent.  The practical upshot of this is that the people who invest in the stock market in this scenario will be precisely the ones for whom the stock market is a good investment, given their personal propensity to save and desire for returns, and so forth. Finally, you mentioned that in your scenario the GDP stagnation is due to declining population.  I am less certain what this means for investment, but my first thought is that you would have a large retired population selling its investments to fund late-life consumption, and you would have a comparatively small (relative to history) working population buying those assets.  This would lead to low asset prices, and therefore high rates of return.  However, that's assuming that retirees need to sell assets to fund their retirement consumption.  If the absolute returns on retirees' assets are large enough to fund their retirement consumption then you would wind up with relatively few sellers, resulting in high prices and therefore relatively low rates of return.  It's not obvious to me which effect would dominate, and so it's hard to say whether or not the resulting returns would look attractive to the working-age population." I do this very thing, but with asset allocation and risk parity in mind. I disagree with the cash or bust answers above, but many of the aforementioned facts are valuable and I don't mean to undermine them in anyway. That said, let's look at two examples: Option 1: All-in For the sake of argument let's say you had $100k invested in the SPY (S&P 500 ETF) in early 2007, and you kept it there until today. Your lowest balance would have been about $51k, and at this point the possibility of you losing your job was probably at a peak. Today you would be left with $170k assuming no withdrawal. Option 2: Risk Parity BUT if you balanced your investments with a risk parity approach, using negatively correlated asset classes you avoid this dilemma. If you had invested 50% in XLP (Consumer Staples Sector ETF) and 50% in TLT ( Long Term Treasury ETF) your investments low point would have been $88k, and your lowest annual return would be +0.69%. Today you would be left with $214k assuming no withdrawals.  I chose option #2 and it hasn't failed me yet, even in 2016 so far the results are steady and reliably given the reward. My general opinion is simple: when you have money always grow it. Just be sure to cover your ass and prepare for rain. Backtesting for this was done at portfoliovisualizer.com, the one caveat to this approach is that inflation and a lack of international exposure are a risk here. "you want more information on what? The general bond market? This article is getting at something different, but the first several pages are general background info on the corporate bond market.  http://home.business.utah.edu/hank.bessembinder/publications/transparencyandbondmarket.pdf  If you are trying to relate somehow the issue of federal debt ( a la treasuries) to corporate debt you will find that you are jumping to a lot of conclusions.   Debt is not exactly currency, only the promise of repayment at a certain date in the future. The only reason that U.S. treasuries ( and those of certain other highly rated countries ) is interchangeable is because they are both very liquid and have very low risk.   There is very little similarity to this in the corporate bond market. Companies are no where near to the risk level of a government (for one they can't print their own money) and when a corporation goes bankrupt it's bondholder are usually s.o.l (recovery rates hover at around 50% of the notional debt amount). This is why investors demand a premium to hold corporate debt. Now consider even the best of companies, (take IBM ) the spread between the interest the government must pay on a treasury bond and that which IBM must pay on a similar bond is still relatively large.   But beyond that you run into a liquidity issue. Currency only works because it is highly liquid. If you take the article about Greece you posted above, you can see the problem generated by lack of liquidity. People have to both have currency and be willing to accept currency for trade to occur. Corporate bond are notoriously illiquid because people are unwilling to take on the risk involved with holding the debt (there are other reasons, but I'm abstracting from them). This is the other reason treasuries can be used as ""currency"" there is always someone willing to take your treasury in trade (for the most part because there is almost zero risk involved). You would always be much more willing to hold a treasury than an equivalent IBM bond.   Now take that idea down to a smaller level. Who would want to buy the bonds issued by the mom and pop down the street? Even if someone did buy them who would in turn take these bonds in trade? Practically speaking: no one would. They have no way to identify the riskiness of the bond and have no assurance that there would be anyone willing to trade for it in the future.   If you read the whole post by the redditor from your first link this is precisely why government backed currency came about, and why the scenario that I think you are positing is very unlikely." "seems like a dumb idea to me. Will these people know what to do with $1000? Will they know best how to invest it or will it be squandered on booze, or just plain living expenses? It might be better spent giving it to them with a string such as ""buy a cow or chickens that can produce"" or seed for a patch of land. I expect some will fall in each of the three catagories. Question now is what will be the distribution?" "This is a common and good game-plan to learn valuable life skills and build a supplemental income. Eventually, it could become a primary income, and your strategic risk is overall relatively low. If you are diligent and patient, you are likely to succeed, but at a rate that is so slow that the primary beneficiaries of your efforts may be your children and their children. Which is good! It is a bad gameplan for building an ""empire."" Why? Because you are not the first person in your town with this idea. Probably not even the first person on the block. And among those people, some will be willing to take far more extravagant risks. Some will be better capitalized to begin with. Some will have institutional history with the market along with all the access and insider information that comes with it.  As far as we know, you have none of that. Any market condition that yields a profit for you in this space, will yield a larger one for them. In a downturn, they will be able to absorb larger losses than you. So, if your approach is to build an empire, you need to take on a considerably riskier approach, engage with the market in a more direct and time-consuming way, and be prepared to deal with the consequences if those risks play out the wrong way." Being able to make small investments in very valuable real estate could make this a game changer. I want to invest in a skyscraper in the UAE, but I only have $10k. I can just use REAL tokens to buy a percentage of that property. At least, that's the way I understand this to work. It will be most interesting to see what happens as Oil starts to get traded more in more in other currencies.  In the controlled demolition that was the WTC, you could see the disbelief in peoples faces as the top started to topple and the first few floors pancaked, then the fear as they realized the whole thing was coming down and they started to run.  Feels the same, a controlled demolition, 9.8 m/s^2 all the way down. Free fall