Stephen Leeb: Expect $5 Gas, $60 Silver & $3,000 Gold in 2012

With 2011 coming to a close and gold and silver stabilizing after the recent smash, today King World News interviewed acclaimed money manager Stephen Leeb, Chairman & Chief Investment Officer of Leeb Capital Management. KWN wanted to get his outlook for 2012 and thoughts on the recent takedown in the metals. When asked about the action in gold, Leeb responded, “The fact that gold has gone down, in the face of what should be good news, has really spooked people. But there are a lot of reasons you can have corrections, even the strongest markets have corrections. This could have started because Paulson sold a big chunk of his GLD.”

Stephen Leeb continues:

“Why did he (Paulson) sell GLD? Because he bet a lot on banks and banks lost 25% or 30% in value. There may have been other hedge funds in the same position. To put this correction in perspective, in 2008 gold went down, from top to bottom, by 34%. Most of that decline followed Bear Stearns. It reflected a lack of liquidity in the system.

The point I’m making is these kind of corrections are just that, corrections. This is hard to believe, but gold today, it’s yearly average is 20% higher than the yearly average in 2010. That’s a remarkable move. Gold had a great year.

All of the sudden you have an asset that’s been in an eleven year bull market and everybody is bearish on it. It’s quite remarkable when you think about it. I just want to add that we are now shutting down refineries in this country because they are no longer profitable…..

“That means you could have a floor, not a ceiling, but a floor of $4 per gallon of gasoline this summer.

If Europe ever does get its act together we could see crude move to $120 to $130 a barrel. That would mean $5 a gallon gasoline at the pump. This is going to be a massive tax on consumers for which the government gets no benefit.

It’s going to slow down the economy and at the same time it will juice up inflation. This means the Fed is not going to risk another depression so they may loosen in the face of inflation going up. If that happens, not that gold would even need it, but this would take gold’s uptrend and add multiple turbo-boosters to it.

I’ll give you my target for gold at the end of 2012, it’s going to be trading somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000. This correction, in other words, is a non-event. The rubber band analogy applies here, for every dollar down on gold, it will mean an extra dollar on the upside when we get the reversal.

It’s so important for investors that are not seasoned, it’s so important not to get shaken out of your position here. And if you have extra money on the side, this is a great buying opportunity.

Segueing into silver, silver is even better here. The Chinese have started to stockpile silver, sort of hidden in an announcement they made the other day. They are not going to export any silver. China is not going to export, according to their latest announcement, not even one ounce of silver.

So, if I were to target silver for the end of 2012, I’m going to be very, very conservative and say silver will finish 2012 at $60. It’s going to make new all-time highs.”

Dr. Stephen Leeb: Chairman & Chief Investment Officer of Leeb Capital Management and the

author of “Red Alert: How China’s Growing Prosperity Threatens the American Way of Life”

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