> there are still quite a few situations where having something of trade value is better than having nothing

I struggle to think of ones where physically-held gold is better than cash. It only happens when your government fails. In that case (e.g. a Communist revolution or civil war) it's easier to kill you and take everything than negotiate. Where it might have had value, e.g. an American holding pounds sterling during the American Revolution, the old money held value. Selling gold to paranoid individuals is so profitable for a reason.

(The only time it may be useful is if you can tell someone about to harm you that you can pay them with something offsite. At that point, however, wired dollars are an easier sell than waiting for a gold shipment that may or may not be accompanied by Marines.)

It's not necessarily negotiating, it's likely fleeing your home country to some other place and having an asset you can easily turn into the local currency wherever you wind up. And at $1,200/oz you can carry/conceal a sizable amount on the "personal money" scale.

Qaddafi paid his mercenaries in gold near the end of his reign.

If we're in the kind of crisis where all fiat money is useless, gold will be useless too. The only kind of thing that will have value are things that help you survive. A crate full of gauze pads and bandaids would be better than a whole stack of gold bullion in that situation.

There is quite a continuum between fiat currency collapsing and the sort of zombie apocalypse you describe.

Fiat currency has become worthless many times in many countries without a total breakdown of civilization to the extent that gold no longer has any value (e.g., Argentina, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Weimar Germany, post-revolution France, ...)

I always imagined that if you were stockpiling large amounts of gold in your home it was more of a survivalist thing than a risk management thing.

You've never been through a country scale crisis.

In a country scale crisis people would be selling all their valuables for fire sale prices to pay for essentials, including gold. A fiat reserve currency, like the Swiss Franc or the Pound would be easier to use, less likely to be stolen and more valuable then gold shavings.

Gold isn't going to save you from a zombie apocalypse, nor can you eat it. It will however transport your wealth from one side of a currency crisis to the other while retaining value - as opposed to plastic notes with arbitrary numbers of zeros printed on them.

There is plenty of physical gold in Germany's vaults: https://www.google.de/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/germany-p...