$15,000 Gold by 2026? Jim Rickards Says Yes.
$15,000? Here’s Why!
Gold expert and best-selling author James Rickards says that gold will skyrocket, reaching $15,000 an ounce by 2026 or sooner.
Now, with its recent surge to all-time highs, gold is attracting new attention from analysts eager to get in front of the parade with higher gold price forecasts.
But Rickards forecast is not new. He reiterates it in the face of the last price advances to assure his readers that he is not just jumping on the gold bandwagon, but that his call is based on his analysis of prior gold bull markets: “This gold price forecast is based on the best available tools and models that have proved accurate in many other contexts.”
The prior gold bull markets that Rickard uses to forecast this bull market include the one from August 1971 – when Nixon severed the dollar’s last tie to gold – to January 1980. During that run gold exploded from $35 an ounce to $800, for a 2,200 percent gain.
Rickards dates the second gold bull market from $25o an ounce in August 1999 to $1,900 12 years later, in August 2011. That was a gain of 670 percent.
Now we are in a third gold bull market, says Rickards:
The third bull market in gold began on Dec. 16, 2015, with gold hitting a bottom of $1,050 per ounce at the end of the prior bear market. Since then, gold has rallied to about $2,187 per ounce as of today.
If we take a simple average of the price gains and durations of the two prior bull markets in gold, we arrive at a 1,435% gain over a period of 10.2 years.
Applying that gain and duration to a baseline of $1,050 per ounce beginning in December 2015 leads to a gains projection for this bull market of $15,070 per ounce by August 2026.
We can attest that Rickards has not cherry-picked evidence to make an exceptionally bullish case. Those of us in the markets at the time witnessed gold trades as high as $850 in January 1980.
Rickards concludes, “Using the history of gold bull markets as a guide, a dollar price of gold of $15,000 per ounce in under three years is not that big a stretch.”
We agree because the price of gold is a referendum on the quantity and quality of the US dollar.