Will gold really hit $3,000 an ounce in the next 18 months?

Bank of America is predicting that the gold price will hit an all-time high of $3,000 an ounce in the next year and half. John Stepek looks at just how likely that is.

Gold bars and coins © Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Time to stock up on gold? © Getty
(Image credit: Gold bars and coins © Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Gold is set to hit $3,000 an ounce in the next 18 months. That’s about 50% more than its all-time high, set back in 2011. (It’s at about $1,700 an ounce just now).

You might be tempted to dismiss this as yet another hopeful-yet-hallucinatory outburst from the bulletin boards of one of the internet’s dedicated gold websites. But it’s not. This is a call from a major investment bank – Bank of America.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.