This is a question that often gets asked in the gold bug community.  It is also a question that sometimes gets answered, even if incorrectly, by many prognosticators or wanna-be prognosticators.  So how high can gold go?

This is a question of timing.  That is where people trying to predict the future usually go wrong.  Most of the time, the prediction will put too short of a time frame on a certain event.

There were people in 2003 saying there was a housing bubble.  There weren’t a lot, but there were a few.  The ones who said it was a bubble and nothing more were eventually proven right.  The problem is the ones who said the housing bubble would crash in the next year (or whatever time frame was given).  They didn’t expect that it could go on for another 4 years.

I see the same thing with predictions on the price of gold.  I’ve heard various predictions of $2,000 per ounce, $5,000 per ounce, $10,000 per ounce, etc.  Some give a time frame and some don’t.  The ones who do give a time frame will probably be wrong.  The ones who don’t give a time frame will probably be right.  But if someone predicts $2,500 gold without a time frame and it takes 10 years from now to hit that price, I’m not really sure that much credit should be given.

If timing is out of the question, then the answer to our question is easy.  How high can gold go?  It can go to infinity.

I would be surprised if the U.S. dollar still existed as a form of money 200 years from now.  Something will change.  So in that respect, the U.S. dollar as we know it today will likely be virtually worthless in 200 years.  25 years from now?  That is a lot harder to say.

Of course, the price of gold could end up being $1,000,000 per ounce or something like that.  Even today, a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar is sold for a couple of U.S. dollars.  It makes an interesting souvenir and perhaps a good economics lesson for others who see it.

I have my guesses as to where the dollar price of gold is going to go, with a guess on the time frame.  But they really are just guesses.  We cannot predict human action.  I, nor anyone else, can predict what the Federal Reserve will do.  Even members of the Fed don’t really know what they are going to do in the future.  And we certainly don’t know how the market, made up of billions of people, will react to various economic conditions.

But for what it’s worth, which really isn’t much, my best guess is that gold will go to over $2,500 per ounce in the next three years.  If we hit a deep recession, all bets are off.  Of course, trying to time things, I will probably be wrong.  Better to be conservative and call it 5 years.