Quote Originally Posted by ChunkyMonkey View Post
Yep.. my parents had to fly out of Jakarta, Indonesia during the 1997 riot in Indonesia. The currency dropped 500% overnight, and banking system shut down. They used silver to bribe themselves out of there and for the tickets.
Your family has had first hand experience, most of us only have decades of investing in paper created by Wall Street.

The money in our pockets now, those 1s, 5s, 20s, etc., is not backed by anything physical at all, except the force of government. Those bills only hold their value on the government's say-so, and the government can change it anytime they want.