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Evans-Pritchard: Gold Target Could Be $6,300 Monday, November 23, 2009 10:44 AM By: Gene J. Koprowski Article Font Size   The last time gold skyrocketed was in the 1970s, when central banks around the world hoarded bullion with the same enthusiasm as gold bugs. A trend just like that is happening once again, writes financial columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Writing in London’s The Telegraph, Evans-Pritchard reckons the “eerie similarity” of the move of India’s central bank to buy half the IMF’s entire sale of gold and the decision by France’s central bank to start converting dollars into gold 44 years ago was the “start of the slippery slope” leading to the demise of the Bretton Woods financial policy system and the closing of the U.S. gold window under President Nixon. “In the gold mania that followed, the price rose to levels that matched the U.S. dollar monetary base — it reached 140 pence at the peak,” writes Evans-Pritchard. “If that were to occur today after Ben Bernanke’s go at the printing press, gold would have to reach $6,300 an ounce.” The columnist notes that gold has been up and been down but is trading now at approximately the same real price as in the mid-13th century “when an ounce bought a light suit of chain mail.” The price of the precious metal doubled in the late medieval bubble before crashing over the next 500 years after the Spanish gold discoveries by Cortes and Pizarro in the New World and then the finds in California, Australia, and South Africa. Gold bottomed in 1930 during the Hoover administration. Gold hit a record high at $1,170.55 an ounce on Monday as dollar weakness pushed the metal through key technical resistance levels, fuelling momentum buying after the metal's sharp run higher earlier this month, Reuters reports.