Gold is just another commodity. It is not used as a monetary basis anywhere in the modern civilized world.
And that's exactly why we're in this mess. I like how you throw modern and civilized in there, as if we were not modern or civilized in 1971 when American politicians had recklessly borrowed so heavily over its gold reserves to finance pointless crap like the Vietnam war, The Great Society, and the War on Poverty, that there was a run on America and Nixon suspended the Bretton Woods agreement rather than pay them back. Remember, we became the reserve currency of the world under gold, and then shifted to fiat, sending the world into an inflationary era. We are the epicenter of this mess. Not wanting politicians to have the ability to arbitrarily manufacture something you worked hard for is not an outmoded idea relevant to a bygone era, and I'm sure people in Zimbabwe experiencing your idea of modern would be quick to agree with me as they wheel their wads of money around to buy a carton of eggs. And for your information, banks around the world still hoard it.
It is true that gold bumps upward in times of economic crisis, mostly because of the economic ignorance of a large part of the population. The rest of the time, gold plunges in value-overall, its a spectacularly lousy investment.
Gold is not an investment, it's money. It doesn't pay a dividend, it doesn't increase production to buy it. If gold plunges relative to dollars, so do other commodities, so you haven't lost anything. Google a chart comparing gold to oil in the last thirty years since we left the gold standard. If it stands for economic ignorance, then its pretty stable ignorance, because the movements in dollar terms between the two are largely congruent, because its the dollar in which they're priced which was fluctuating.
If you truely feel economic collapse is upon us, conveert your moneyt to useful items, not gold. Bullets, bags of flour, whatever make a whole lot more sense.
While those are good things to have, they make for terrible money, and you're still going to need money (a common means of exchange) in order to perform day-to-day transactions and get back to the lifestyle you once knew. Otherwise, you're reducing yourself to barter, and even the dumbest of Keynesians know you can't run a modern economy that way.