States are stockpiling gold to hedge against a debt crisis — here’s how much you should actually hold in your portfolio

Proponents of the law, including GOP State Sen. Bob Ide (3), point to inflation, a weak dollar, and the country’s rising debt as the reason for the move. Ide firmly believes a debt crisis is coming.

“I can’t put a timeline on it, but there’s gonna be a sovereign-debt crisis,” he told the WSJ (1). “There’s no will to rein in spending [at the federal level].”

The state has placed the gold in the vault of Wyoming Reserve (4), a private company that has converted the former headquarters of the Casper Star-Tribune newspaper into a secure storage facility.

So is it time for private citizens to mimic the moves of this state and stockpile gold bars in the garage? Not so fast, say experts. Here’s the amount of gold you can consider holding in your portfolio, plus some ideas on how to invest that don’t involve physical assets.

The new gold standard for U.S. states?

Wyoming isn’t the only state that is hedging its bets against the federal debt crisis by stockpiling precious metals. The WSJ notes that other states with a long mining history are also storing gold or in the process of passing legislation for this purpose.

Utah, for example, passed a law in 2024 (5) to allow the state to purchase as much as $140 million in precious metals. As of March 2025, the state had $60 million in gold reserves, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune (6).

West Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia are eyeing similar measures. But Utah has gone a step further, passing a law (5) in March 2025 that allows state vendors to be paid in gold and silver — a move towards the gold standard (7) that was held in this country until the presidency of Richard Nixon.

The pros and cons of holding physical gold

While gold was on an historic run in 2025 (8), recent price fluctuations remind investors that the precious metal isn’t meant to be a growth investment (9) like stocks, but a store of value that hedges against stumbles in other investment markets.

Gold increased so much in value in 2025 precisely because economic uncertainty and low confidence in the stock market pushed many investors to expand their holdings. However, the average investor doesn’t necessarily need a big position in gold.

The traditional advice is to hold 5% of your portfolio in gold (10), though the recent boom in the metals market has some investment firms like Sprott (11) arguing for a 10-15% portfolio allocation across physical gold and gold equities.

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio told CNBC (12) in a February 2025 interview that “people don’t have, typically, an adequate amount of gold in their portfolio.”

“When bad times come, gold is a very effective diversifier,” he said.

In spite of recent price spikes, gold is generally a sleepy performer in an investment portfolio compared to stocks. NYU professor Aswath Damodaran (13) has tabulated the performance of stocks, gold, and other investments for every year since 1928. While gold gained 5.12% in value between 1928 and 2024, the S&P 500 nearly doubled that performance at 9.94% over the same period (14).

What critics of Wyoming’s move are saying

While individuals might not want to hold a great deal of their wealth in gold, many of those opposed to the Wyoming Gold Act are also pointing out some of its flaws as a public holding.

Gov. Mark Gordon, who did not sign the bill, called it a threat to Wyoming’s financial security, per the WSJ. The article noted that in addition to being the governor, Gordon is a former state treasurer.

“Gold is not an investment as much as it is a commodity or store of value,” he said in a letter (15). “The only income to be derived from gold is to sell it for a greater price than it was purchased.”

Current Wyoming Treasurer Curt Meier told the Cowboy State Daily (16) newspaper the state could have invested in gold without this law, if its investors judged that would be beneficial.

“The downside is, there’s no way to take advantage of any increase in value, unless you sell your physical assets,” he said of the gold stockpile.