Forbes magazine asks: "Is ammo the new gold?"

Back in the 70s, my economics professor William Jennings Bryan, Jr. used to tell us about the story of the German housefrau who, at the height of the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation, took her billions of Reichsmarks to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread. Unable to get it up the steps, she left the money sitting on the sidewalk, convinced that no one would steal such a load of worthless paper. We she came out after negotiating the price with the baker (a constant thing in a hyperinflation) she found her money in the gutter and the wheelbarrow gone.

Now we have a story in Forbes entitled "The Bullet Bubble: Is Ammo The Next Bitcoin, Or Gold In The 1970s?"

Of course it is written by somebody who is almost totally ignorant of ammunition realities. For example:

Are bullet owners running the same risk? This helpful FAQ from ATC’s Federal Premium unit says bullets have a shelf life of about 10-years, meaning eventually the ammo that doesn’t get shot or sold will have to be disposed of some other way.

A. The moron doesn't apparently know the difference between "bullets" and loaded rounds. Bullets, being inert, last almost forever -- ask any archaeologist. I knew a guy back up in the Alabama hills who chanced upon a rotted 1000-round ammo box of .58 Caliber minie ball ammunition decades ago in an old barn, salvaged the bullets, cleaned them up, and fired them in his reproduction musket at deer every season (and sometimes out of season, but that's Winston County for you).

B. Loaded rounds, if kept in the proverbial cool, dry place in military packaging such as M19A1 ammo cans or ComBloc "spam cans," will keep for seventy years or so. "Ten years" my aching posterior.

Then there's this statement:

How long will the shortages last? Given flat hunting participation, and assuming there hasn’t been a step-change increase in target shooting in America, the hoarding will have to come to an end sooner or later. Consumers will run out of room to store the stuff.

What a silly man. Run "out of room"? Maybe run short on disposable income to buy the stuff, but "run out of room"? Obviously this fellow is so out-of-touch he doesn't get that many folks are buying ammunition to USE IT if civil war breaks out. The evidence is right there in front of his face and he compares ammunition to the electronic chimera of "bitcoins"? See previous stories on silver shortages. The only thing that holds its value is real property -- especially when the governments are printing paper as fast as they can. Don't like ammo, gold or silver? You can always invest in wheelbarrows. Unless things get really bad, when somebody with a firearm will come along and relieve you of the wheelbarrow to haul his ammo in.