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>How about gold, silver, arable land ?
>http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-screaming-fundamentals-owning-gold-and-silver

Interesting reading but nothing really new except I didn't know governments were buying gold again ... hmmm ...

Gold yes, I agree, one should have a decent percentage of ones assets in physical gold, not shares or other paper gold but the actual metal itself.

Silver is a problem; it is too cheap per ounce so you need hundreds of ounces to have any worthwhile investment. 100 silver coins/rounds of 1oz each is only $3400. Even if silver doubles from this point you make a few thousand dollars - hardly something to retire on :) So you need a large volume of metal to make a worthwhile investment. Gold is trading at 44 times this price so you need far less physical metal.

Arable land; you can't trade this, it's a fixed asset. Not an investment unless you are really knowledgeable about property. Otherwise better to buy property funds/ETFs if you want exposure to land/property and liquidity.