Some time ago I had thought to buy some platinum or palladium coins thinking that they wouldn't likely be subject to confiscation, but ultimately chose not to.

Platinum and palladium are truly commodities. They are precious metals but have never (to my knowledge) been considered or used as money.

Their largest usage is as a catalyst in catalytic converters in car exhaust systems, though they have other industrial applications as well. Being as we are deep in recession with other mines closing (copper, zinc, etc.) it is possible some of the platinum and palladium mining operations will shut down at these or lower prices which may come about with the auto industry decline as well. Here knowledge of whether cars worldwide use a catalytic converter exhaust system would be essential and I don't know one way or the other.

I do suspect these metals like most commodities will experience shortages in supply and will run higher in price in the future, but since these two lack the "monetary" aspect of silver and gold its hard to predict how far down they will go or if they have bottomed or are bottoming.

P.