By Dr. David Eifrig in Retirement Millionaire:

The world's richest refugee came to America in 1975 through Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

The man, a former banker in Saigon, was among the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who fled their country in the wake of the U.S. military pullout. The U.S. government designated four military bases - Camp Pendleton, Fort Chafee, Fort Indiantown, and Eglin Air Force Base - to handle the flood of refugees. And at first glance, this man looked like any other immigrant lined up at the base's gates.

I heard this story from an acquaintance, Mike, who was at Eglin AFB when the refugees arrived. Mike was a senior officer for a company called Deak-Perera, which was the world's expert in precious metals and currencies. The U.S. government needed help assimilating all the refugees at these camps and hired Deak-Perera to help determine the value of the goods each person brought with him. That was Mike's job.

Mike remembers one day vividly. He sat behind the official "moneychangers" table exchanging belongings for U.S. dollars. Most people in line left little impression. But there was one man in a worn, but tailored, suit. He told Mike, like most of the refugees fleeing Saigon, he left with only his family and a small sack of their earthly possessions. As Mike tells it:

He poured the contents of the bag onto the table. There gleaming in the sun were 24-karat gold taels... A form of gold bullion indigenous to Southeast Asia. Each tael was 1.2 ounces of pure gold. They looked like wafer-thin sheets delicately wrapped in paper.

After Mike tallied up the taels, he realized he was staring at a pile of gold worth $1.5 million (And that was in 1975. It would be worth more like $4 million or $5 million today.)

Other men in the camps hauled with them suitcases stuffed with South Vietnamese cash - all now completely worthless in their new country. Even people who brought diamonds, loose gems, and IOUs from the U.S. military were dismayed to find it all nearly worthless (or at least worth much less than they hoped). The only thing that reliably stored value as they fled their homeland was the gold taels.

I love this story about the millionaire refugee... but not for the reasons you'd think. Today, most financial "experts" in the mass media are going crazy cheering for gold. And they tell you it's because gold is an inflation hedge. But it's a lie.

The story about the Vietnamese man has nothing to do with inflation. And certainly, he didn't buy his gold looking for capital gains. Rather, his story captures exactly what I'm talking about when I call gold a "chaos hedge."

If government breaks loose or collapses under its debt and you find your dollar bills worth more as cigarette paper than legal tender, then gold is the one thing you can be sure has value wherever you wake up. But we're not at that point yet...

Crux Note: "Doc" Eifrig is the editor of Retirement Millionaire. He recently discovered an inexpensive investment that could protect your savings as well as gold... or even better. To learn more, click here.

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