Today’s precarious economic environment makes a strong argument for alternative retirement investments for the post-pandemic era. This, at least, is the prevailing sentiment among many investors and market-watchers who fear the effects of inflation, high borrowing costs, unstable foreign capital markets as exemplified by Evergrade, and a potential stock market pullback. In fact, the year-over-year rise in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the 12-month period ending September 2021 was a staggering 5.4 percent. This jump exceeded expectations, and constitutes the biggest leap in the CPI since 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. Amid concerns of a highly inflationary economy and looming interest rate hikes, some investors are considering an alternative to their stock-heavy retirement investment portfolios to protect their wealth. Gold IRAs are their name, and they function identically to regular IRAs, except that they hold some percentage of their value in physical gold bullion. As …