QUESTION: You said we may enter a Mad Max scenario, if so would the Dow go to 0?
ANSWER: Everything goes to ZERO including gold. That is a Dark Age and this is caused by corruption in government, high taxes so people just walk away from real property, war, crop failures, and effectively you end up without money, any rule of law, and a the entire system reverts to plain barter from where it began. This took place in Greece between the Heroic & Hellenistic periods, Rome, and Japan. Hopefully, we will blink before we go too far but weather is going crazy as well and that is not good. Nothing survives because there is no rule of law, which is the cornerstone of civilization. Remove that, and you cannot own anything as title becomes mere possession. When Rome fell, there was the knee-jerk reaction of trying to put it back together and the barbarians tried to even imitate the coinage. But that soon died out and coins largely vanished during the 7th century. In Japan, the abuse of money by government and the lack of a rule of law led to the collapse of the monetary system and there was NO MONEY even coined for 600 years.
Money (gold and silver) evolved as a medium of exchange to facilitate barter. They had no utilitarian value so they evolved as a medium of exchange only as a luxury. The core of money was something of a practical nature that one needed. The two most common forms of a medium of exchange are (1) food which was cattle and grain, with the second (2) bronze for use as a tool. The earliest forms of money in Rome were grain and cattle and as bronze emerged, ingots traded with images of cattle and grain. These were both symbols used on early bronze ingots for they were a substitute for the real thing..
When we look at Italy and the Romans, we find the idea of MONEY and VALUE emerges from cattle, which even today provides the foundation for the terminology of MONEY and financial interests. The Latin for cattle was “PECUS” from which emerged the word for MONEY that became “PECUNIA” in Latin. At first glance you may not see how we still use this word and concept of cattle today. When someone has a financial interest in something, he is said to have a “PECUNIARY” interest. Cattle thus were the valuable object that served as the MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE and the UNIT OF ACCOUNT.
A Mad Max Scenario is the collapse of everything and we head into a dark age. That would only be likely (1) if we do not blink, and (2) after the peak in 2032.