In his latest note, JP Morgan executive director of global commodities research Greg Shearer projects the price of gold will average around $2,175 an ounce by the fourth quarter of 2024. That would represent an 11% increase from the current price.

Shearer anticipates the end of the Federal Reserve hiking cycle after the July meeting with a cut likely by mid-2024. He said there is even further upside potential for the yellow metal if the US economy falls into a recession. The deeper the recession, the more the Fed will have to cut interest rates, which is more supportive of gold.

We're in a very prime place where we think gold ownership and long allocation to gold and silver is something that acts as both a late cycle diversifier and something that will perform as we look to the next sort of 12, 18 months."

With much stronger-than-expected second-quarter GDP growth and continued labor market strength, a growing number of people in the mainstream now think the US has escaped the clutches of a recession despite the Fed driving interest rates to the highest level in 16 years. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said staff economists at the central bank now project a noticeable slowdown in growth starting later this year, "But given the resilience of the economy recently, they are no longer forecasting a recession."

But there are plenty of signs that a recession is looming, including 15 consecutive drops in the Index of Leading Economic Indicators (the most consecutive negative prints since 2007-2008), an inverted yield curve, and a rising number of corporate defaults.

Given the fact that the Fed has taken away the economy's lifeblood – easy money – a deep recession seems more likely than not. The economy was built on artificially low-interest rates and quantitative easing. We saw what happens to an over-leveraged economy when the Fed takes away the easy money back in 2008. The situation is much worse today than it was then, with more debt and more malinvestments.