Historically at times, gold has offset losses during times of economic stress/volatility.
Today many, including retirement super savers, are seeking wealth protection against bank failures, which have arisen. Some of these bank failures were caused by the Federal Reserve ramping up interest rates extraordinarily fast. That made some of the banks' reserves, often held in Treasury debt, drop in price. Moreover, those losses, combined with a rush to the exits by bank depositors, caused some of these banks to fold.
Regardless of these isolated incidents, there are deeper issues in our banking system that should concern any depositor. For one, banks used to have higher reserve requirements, meaning they needed to keep a certain amount of depositor money liquid. Today, they can lend out or invest as much as they want with no limit.
Not much is mentioned about this in the mainstream press, but as of March 2020, the Federal Reserve dropped the reserve requirement on all depository institutions to zero. As a result, it made holding reserves completely voluntary.
Scary Implications
Consequently, that has some scary implications if you have considerable money in the banking system. Yes, the FDIC protects you up to $250,000 in most instances. Still, that agency does not necessarily have the means to cover a significant amount of losses if that were to occur. According to CNN, U.S. banks are sitting on billions of dollars of unrealized losses.
While the government may step in and print more money, that leads to further implications down the road. And as a depositor, you depend upon counterparties to be willing and able to return your money when you want it (or backstop the bank if the money is not there when you need it). Bottom line, your capital is at risk anytime there is a counterparty.
Furthermore, with gold and other precious metals, there is no counterparty. As hard assets, you can hold these investments in your hand. They are real, instead of just being an accounting entry that may or may not be honored.
Therefore, physical gold and other precious metals are really the only assets out there with no counterparty risk. And they are honored and can be traded in any country.