I have some extra money lying around in USD being slowly devoured by inflation. The conventional wisdom is to invest in stocks or bonds in the US. Fundamentally, that’s just gambling on the continued success of empire. Should I buy gold or other metals
instead? Are there non-dollar-denominated ways to invest in economic development of the global south instead? I don’t care about returns I just want long-term stability of value
Long term stability and returns are the same thing. If you don't get returns, you lose it to inflation.
If you want to invest outside of the US, you can do:
Vanguards VXUS - global ETF outside the US
BNDX - global bonds outside the US (stability may not be what you want, but this year it's outperforming BND ATM)
If this is your savings you can do actual bonds or bond ladders, but having something like a high yield savings account outside of where you live can be tricky.
One thing to remember though is that most companies that make up the ETFs are global, so you'll find the big companies in ETFs everywhere.
Your best bet though is to just put it in a high yield savings account, but not having that in US institutions will be difficult.
This isn't quite the answer that you wanted, and I don't know how you'd get out of dollars when you live in a country that uses dollars.
It's more of can you get accounts for financial institutions where you are or invest using their currencies. That has more to do with being a resident, having citizenship, or whatever is required.
But think of currency this way: you trade currency for an asset. When you sell it, you can get a different currency for it.
Is your concern to not hold dollars, or to do trade in currency that isn't a dollar? Ultimately, if you want to give your support to outside the US, just invest in ETFs or bonds or whatever outside the US. Whether or not you use dollars has little to do with the benefit
To add, the problem has more to do with things like delivery and storage. That cuts in to your value, but if you can, go for it. If not or if it's not reasonable, some ETFs or some proxy can be fine.
But as always, don't put much money behind what you hear from ppl on the internet.
The reason I say to hold the physical metal is because if you just hold an ETF, you are holding an IOU for gold, but you are not holding gold. Whereas if you own the physical metal and you can hold it in your hand, then you own it. And if somebody wants it, they have to take it from you by force. With an ETF, they can just say, oh, well, we're not going to give you your money back. Sorry.
Are you in America? Excuse the answer, but I'm serious. If so-
Water purifier. Big ol' clean metal barrel will do. Preferably not aluminum. Get a filter or make one with bags of clean sand, rocks/gravel and charcoal. Get a lot of charcoal. Rain catchers.
Vitamin and nutrient supplements. Iodine. Prussian Blue. Bleach and disinfectants, masks, gloves. Depends on what you feel would apply to you. Plus they're cheap.
(In spaces without dedicated growing spaces you can order indoor grow kits. You can grow more than weed indoors ya know. Combine that with tinned food and you're set.)
Self-defense. Martial arts, a knife, a gun, trapping, etc.
Start talking to others in your community. Not even for the sake of bonding; but knowing who is around you. What their beliefs are. If they are armed. Bond and start talking about community plans with your neighbors and trusted community. Otherwise your investments won't mean much when shit hits the fan.
Most of this is based off the assumption that you want security. Finances, yes, but those finances and investments are for emergencies I imagine. I'm telling you dropping that mindset is better and to invest in things that will make you far more valuable than gold in a shit situation.
You want a physical asset to hold onto? Toilet paper. Not joking.
Thanks for taking the time to write this out! I really appreciate it. Having secure physical resources that are immediately useful is a good idea, I’ll think of what I can do to that extent.
honestly all investments are risky and likely tied to imperialism. you could go the dprk route with bitcoin but now is probably not a good time to buy but i am definitely no expert on it.
you could also invest in chinese stocks but they seem to often get shorted and devalued due to western capital's fickle nature, imo
They're all under valued because China actually curbs harmful monopolies, extreme exploitation that is great for profits, and nationalizes troublesome companies
I suppose they refer to the fact the DPRK uses crypto-coins to evade sanctions. It's not that their whole economy is based on them and really it seems most likely a large amount of the coins they do own have been stolen from the west via hacks so their exposure to actual risk should the whole thing go down in flames is likely to be lower and less impactful than if you as an individual invested in it and the whole thing went down in flames.
Fact is they don't do a ton of foreign trade so the actual amount of crypto-coins used compared to both total size of foreign trade with friendly countries like China and Russia as well as the total size of their economy which isn't foreign-trade oriented is pretty small so again it's not a big risk for them to use them for sanctions evasion whereas the exposure to an individual putting half their savings in crypto is a lot, lot worse.
I'm not particularly an economic expert so take my words with a grain of salt but I don't see crypto as particularly useful as an investment vehicle, it's basically a situation where you either got in on the ground floor and got rich off a fluke OR you're using them to do illegal things like buy narcotics or send funds to sanctioned or designated groups (though with the latter in particular the US can track an trace a lot of the coins back to people eventually so I really wouldn't risk it). Beyond that I don't think they necessarily have a lot of value. Most of the big investors got in fairly early so if most of the larger coins were to say lose 30% of their value they wouldn't be badly hurt whereas you if you bought now and placed your savings in them would be.