Let’s just cut to the chase: Buy gold! Please. Buy gold!

I know, I recommend that a lot. I even sound like a broken record to myself.

But when the facts demand certain actions, well, then, those are the actions I feel compelled to tell you about over and over because I believe they’re that important.

And, right now, owning physical gold somewhere in your finances is crucial — despite the price trend in the last few years, and despite the dunderheads who tell you that gold is an antiquated asset that plays no useful role today.

They are all dead — dead! — wrong. Two recent actions underscore my assertion…

In the last week or two, this headline popped up in London’s Financial Times: Online retailer hoards gold as crisis defense.

Turns out that Overstock.com has loaded up on some $10 million of gold and silver — metal that would be used to pay employee wages in the event of a crisis. As chairman Jonathan Johnson explains it: “We thought there’s a decent chance that there could be a banking holiday at some point caused by a crisis and it could last for two days or two weeks or who knows how long, and we wanted to be in a position where we could continue to operate during any such crisis.”

Make no mistake: That’s a U.S. financial crisis that impacts the dead presidents in your wallet.

And to be clear, Overstock owns physical metal, stored in a secure, offsite location. Management is wise enough to avoid the toxic junk known as gold exchange-traded funds (ETF). Paper gold will prove that it’s worth about as much as paper in a true crisis. When gold prices move unexpectedly higher, the market for all the gold IOUs and swaps and various financially engineered gold transactions face their own potential crisis that will cause havoc among ETF owners.

So, Overstock owns physical gold and silver — and precisely for the reason I write about all the time: insurance for the economic, monetary and governmental risks we face today.