Citi Predicts Gold At $3400 In "The Next Two Years", Potential For Move As High As $6000

Following today's margin call anticipating, liquidation-driven rout in gold, the weak hands are, as the saying goes, puking up blood. Which may not be a bad thing - after all, sometimes a catharsis is needed to get people away from potentially toxic paper exposure which very likely has been hypothecated repeatedly via the same channels we discussed last week when exposing the MF Global-HSBC "commingled gold" lawsuit. But what about the future? Well, nobody can ever predict it, but at least we can sometimes look at charts in an attempt to glean a pattern. Which is why we present the just released slide deck from Citi's FX Technicals group titled "The 12 Chart of Christmas" which has some blockbuster predictions about the coming year, chief among them is without doubt the firm's outlook on gold which they see at $2400 in the second half of 2012, and moving "toward $3400 over the next 2 years or so." So for those looking at today's price action, consider it an opportunity to roll out of paper exposure and into gold, because the more deflationary the environment gets, the more eager the central planning cabal will be to add a zero (which in our day and age of primarily electronic money can be done with the flip of a switch) to the end of every worthless piece of monetary equivalent paper in circulation. And that's a 100% certainty.

From Citi:

While we remain cautious on Gold in the near term and believe that we could correct lower towards $1,600 and possibly re-test the $1,550 area we continue to believe that the bull market remains intact. As with the Equity market we believe that 2012 may be reminiscent of 1978 when Gold rallied nearly 50% off the 1977 close. Such a move would likely put Gold in the $2,300-2,400 area in the 2nd half of 2012.

On a longer term basis we expect even higher levels and target a move towards $3,400 over the next 2 years or so. We are not yet on board with the idea of a move with the same magnitude as seen in 1970-1980 when the last spike in Dec 1979-Jan 1980 saw Gold almost double in price as Russia invaded Afghanistan. Such a dynamic would suggest a move above $6,000 but we prefer to take a more conservative stance and look for a move similar to that seen without that final event driven push at the high which was a “blowout top” in Jan. 1980.