This is a followup to a previous long-term look at gold. Here the gold futures price since 1976 is drawn on a log-scale. The bottom most line models roughly a 4% growth rate and runs through the low's in the 70's and early 2000. After 2000, gold really took off and followed a much steeper growth rate that I think reflects the tremendous price inflation that we saw in the services economy, i.e. healthcare, housing, education, and so on. Since bouncing off the 50% retracement in 2016 gold has been casually following a less steeper line that may be indicitive of some new era, to early to tell. If they decide to take gold lower then we may well be heading for price normalize along the ~4% line shown here.
Comment:
In thinking about this chart a little more it seems to me that the bounce that occurred in the 2016 and the subsequent march higher in the gold price could be motivated by the massive levels of government spending, and in particular debt levels. From 2000 to 2016 the Total Public Debt increased by a factor of about 3.4, which is in-line with the increase in gold price from the 256 low in 2000, to the 50% retracement level of 1100 in 2016. If gold does indeed track the growth in government spending (and in particular the growth in debt) then a conservative course for gold price would be roughly along the red (unknown) line in the figure. What's more, the growth in the Public Debt is actually increasing (not steady), and this trend shows no sign of ending. So the price of gold could follow a parabolic curve, rather than the straight line shown in the figure.