That is the problem. There are few places to hide. Or as Alan Greenspan said at a younger age:

"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard." Alan Greenspan 1966

Here is the whole essay.

Here is another key excerpt:

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves."

My emphasis in both places.

There is a sea of liquidity out there chasing stocks and bonds right now, as well as PM's. The real SHTF moment will be if/when stocks go south and people start rejecting the bond market. They might not reject stocks and the bond money simply go into stocks. It is so hard to predict the herds moves. But at any rate there are only certain places where large flows of liquidity can go. The bond market is by far largest of the three markets. If it gets spooked, Katy bar the door. We will see prices rise of SOMETHING because bond prices might need to fall a lot before enough buyers are enticed to put in an order on the buy side. It could get ugly. Consider we have several trillion of US bonds being held by soverigns who are now starting to trade between themselves and bypass the dollar, and things could get really ugly. I hope it does not come to that, but the risk is there.

Hard assets. That is all that is left once people start shunning paper promises. But one has to be early rather than late to the party.

No easy way to protect yourself.

John