We’ve been enthusing about gold one rally at a time for more than a year, but it may be time to loosen up and imagine bigger possibilities. Our minimum upside objective has been 736.80 ever since the December Comex contract was trading in the low 690s. However, someone in the Rick’s Picks chat room asked an obvious question the other day: ‘What then?’ We responded initially with a somewhat timid target of 768.90, but we’re starting to think that this target, too, deserves a ‘What then?’

We don’t need to tell anyone that bullion’s price action has been more than a little encouraging lately, and that there are good reasons for this. For the first time in decades, gold is moving strongly higher not because some world-shattering geopolitical event such as the 9/11 attack, or the U.S. invasion of Iraq, has spooked it, but because of a more generalized fear that the financial markets are in deeper trouble than anyone knows how to fix. Nor can they be fixed as far as we’re concerned, and so the forces pushing gold higher at the moment should not be expected to abate any time soon.

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That said, we remain skeptical of predictions that gold’s price eventually will surge into the stratosphere (meaning upwards of $2000 an ounce). Although that’s not inconceivable, the odds it will happen must be weighed against the prospect of a worldwide credit deflation that completely wipes out personal savings. And that is exactly what will occur when the $500 trillion (per BIS) derivatives bubble collapses, as it someday must. The implosion would draw its very power from the deleveraging, or marking to market, of the entire, very thinly collateralized $500 trillion edifice of credit money.

Squatters in Aspen

In the wake of such a catastrophe, we will see bread lines in towns where starter homes now sell for $2 million dollars. Run-of-the-mill Aspen ski chalets listing these days for $10 million will be sold for back taxes once squatters who have been burning furniture to keep warm have been evicted. Impressionist paintings that fetched eight-figure sums will go for low six figures, and ‘priceless’ Bugattis will change hands for less than the current price of a lowly Porsche. Is it unreasonable to speculate that in a world whose economy has been reduced to beggary, gold will fare much better?

Let me explain. Although we fully expect bullion to hold its purchasing power (and then some) relative to all other classes of assets, we don’t expect nuggets and Krugerrands to command the astronomical premiums that some evidently expect. A spectacular price spike in gold could conceivably occur when the panic to exchange intrinsically worthless dollars, euros, d-marks, yens and sterling for something ‘real’ hits full-bore. But anyone who has been hoarding gold for that day should think twice about sitting on it further, since, once the panic subsides, the global economy will be a smoldering ruin, incapable of engendering, much less sustaining, a speculative mania in gold or any other type of investable.

Loaves for Krugerrands

While gold bugs are hardly irrational to view bullion as the ultimate hedge against financial collapse, they need to acknowledge the possibility that if the disaster is as bad as some of them have already imagined it will be, there’s going to be precious few assets left to protect. Instead, there may be only precious loaves of bread to be exchanged for Krugerrands.

For make no mistake, the financial endgame we face has the potential to make the 1930s Depression look like a picnic. Consumer borrowing and cash-out refi’s were non-existent back then, and America, with an economy that was 30% agricultural, was literally living off the land. Nowadays, and for the last few decades, we have been living more and more off the cleverness of financiers who have found ways to create nearly unlimited sums of borrowable money from thin air. We predict that all of this ‘money’ will cease to exist one day because of an epochal lapse in confidence broader, even, and more devastating than the one that precipitated the Great Depression. When angry mobs move on Wall Street and the banks as they did three generations ago, only to discover they have been financially wiped out, who will be the buyers of gold for the mythical price of $10,000 an ounce?

Green Light for Gold

In the meantime, from a technical perspective there is no reason to hold back on gold as an investment, since it has been doing all of the right things on the charts. Pullbacks have consistently failed to reach their Hidden Pivot targets, reversing in most instances near the predicted half-way points of their CD follow-through legs. And for two, Comex contracts keep making bullish impulse legs in all time frames, from the one-minute bars right on up to the hourlys. As long as such rallies continue to surpass the required two prior peaks in whatever time frame is being considered, we can infer that the bull is in no great need of rest.

And that is what we are currently witnessing. The upshot is that, faced with a daunting peak at 732 made 16 months ago, December Gold is acting as though it will require only a day or two’s worth of running room ‘ i.e., 15 to 20 points ‘ to make the leap. As far as we’re concerned, it’s not a question of whether it gets through, but when. We don’t expect this feat to take more than 5-7 days, nor do we think it will be a long wait for a follow-through that reaches a minimum 760.00. And what then, you might ask? We’ll reserve the exact number for subscribers, but let’s just say the Hidden Pivot target we have in mind is well north of $800. Since it will not be a straight shot, our forecasts will continue to reference swing highs and lows the whole way up. Long-time Rick’s Picks subscribers should need no convincing that these numbers will be sufficiently accurate and reliable to use for swing-trading, scalping and adjusting long-term positions.