Are you talking about severance? There is usually a contract that goes along with it, often times preventing the employee from suing, working for a competitor, or talking publicly about the layoffs. Or if a company is doing poorly, the severance is incentive for the remaining employees to not look for new work as the boat sinks. If your coworker received 20k for getting fired, you're going to stick it out in hopes they lay you off next.

You travel forward in time and even great empires fall. Someone will be a bag holder for all those investments. It won't be the guy with a pile of gold.

Because you can travel through time to almost any nation that has ever existed and exchange the gold for the current local currency. If you time travel with US dollars, you'll find the buying value fluctuates quite a bit. And since we have only figured out how to time travel into the future, investing in their currency now would result in a loss down the line.