Two different situations - cash from cash businesses vs. emergency cash. Reading between the lines, I think the OP was talking about emergency cash. As others have noted, in a true national emergency cash may have value for only a couple/few days given what's happened in other countries over the past hundred years. Also as others have noted, that cash depreciates over time, and would even faster in a grave national emergency.
Hope someone will enlighten me if I'm missing something, but the only use I can see for that amount of emergency cash is transportation - either (1) buying transportation and fuel immediately upon the onset of a national emergency or (2) to quickly disappear, get transportation (private plane(s)?) somewhere, and start a new life if one got crossways with the wrong kind of folks. That's probably about the amount of cash needed for the second scenario, but I try to avoid the kind of folks that people run from.
