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To see where gold is heading, watch the dollar: Rickards
Gold prices, fresh from Monday's 15-month high, look set for further gains as the dollar weakens, according to author and gold markets expert Jim Rickards.
Spot gold hit $1,303.6 an ounce on Monday, its highest price since January 2015, and has since come off to trade around $1,295 an ounce on Tuesday morning in Asia.
But Rickards, who is the author of "The New Case for Gold," published last month, as well as 2011 best-seller "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis," said gold was "going to go a lot higher."
"Gold is really constant, what's happening is that the dollar is going down [so] the dollar price of gold is going up," he told CNBC's " The Rundown ". "If you want to understand where the price of gold is going, you have to ask yourself where is the dollar going."
An all-time low for the dollar in August 2011 coincided with an all-time high for gold at $1,900 an ounce, he noted.
Rickards did not give a price target for gold.
The dollar has been falling this year and was further weighed by dovish comments from the Federal Reserve last week on the possibility of new interest rate hikes.
On Monday, the dollar index lost 0.5 percent in a sixth-straight day of decline.
"The currency war goes back to 2010...Everybody wants a weaker currency but it's a mathematical impossibility, you cannot all devalue against each other in the same time, so you have to take turns," Rickards said.
This is one of the reasons the dollar may still have room to fall, Rickards said.
"Now the U.S. needs a break, the U.S. is very close to recession... China 's growth is slowing dramatically and dangerously. [The world's two largest economies] need the weaker currencies so Japan and Europe need to suffer the stronger currencies," he said, referring to a secret agreement rumored to have been struck in February by Group of 20 policymakers to drive the dollar down.
The existence of such a deal was dismissed by Christine Lagarde , the International Monetary Fund 's managing director, in an April interview with CNBC's " Squawk on the Street ."
"If there was such a thing, I wasn't privy to that, and I doubt very much that there would be such an agreement," Lagarde said.
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