Gold $2,500 Looks More Likely Than Ever – DailyFinance

By DAN BURROWS Posted 4:42 PM 06/01/10 Investing




Gold added another $11.30 Tuesday to hit $1,226 an ounce, and although the yellow metal is still well off its nominal all-time high of about $1,240 set just a few weeks ago, you don’t have to be a member of the build-a-bunker-in-Montana crowd to believe gold could hit $2,500 an ounce in the next couple of years.



David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Canada’s Gluskin Sheff, tends to be pretty bearish, but he’s also about as dispassionate and data-driven a guy as you can find. In other words, he’s hardly some kooky gold bug. And if past relationships among data sets hold up, gold fever is just getting started, Rosenberg says.



"There is no doubt that when benchmarked against the CPI, money supply and GDP, gold can easily double from here," Rosenberg told clients in a Tuesday report. "Demand is always difficult to forecast, especially for jewelry, but we do know that central banks have very deep pockets and bought more gold last year (425 tons) than at any other time since 1964."



A Simple Matter of Supply and Demand



Which brings us to the issue of stagnant supply, and that too favors a sustained bull market in gold, Rosenberg says. Global mined production of the ductile metal hasn’t increased in a decade — and has actually declined outright in five of the past eight years. Furthermore, almost all the gold that’s easy to dig up — and therefore cheaper to get at — has been unearthed. Gold companies in South Africa have to drill as much as 2.3 miles to get to new deposits. Meanwhile, all Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has to do to create currency "is press a button," Rosenberg says.



"What makes gold different is that, unlike paper money backed by the good word of the government, it has withstood the test of time for thousands of years," Rosenberg writes. "It is not the liability of any government. It has an inelastic supply curve. How many times is gold mentioned in the Old Testament? Try 391 times. How many times is paper currency mentioned from Noah, to Abraham, to Moses? None. Nada. Efes. Gornisht. Nihil. Rien. Nichts. Niente."

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