NEW YORK:  Nouriel Roubini, the economist who predicted the global economic crisis, said a forecast by investor Jim Rogers that gold will double to at least $2,000 an ounce is “utter nonsense.”

There is no inflation or “near-depression” to drive gold prices that high, Roubini said today at the Inside Commodities Conference in New York. If a severe depression came to pass, with investors buying canned goods and hiding out in log cabins, “maybe you want some gold in that scenario,” Roubini said.

“Maybe it will reach $1,100 or so but $1,500 or $2,000 is nonsense,” Roubini said. Gold rose to a record $1,098.50 today in New York on speculation that central banks and investors will purchase the metal to hedge against a declining dollar.

Rogers, who predicted the start of the commodities rally in 1999, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television today that Roubini is wrong about the threat of bubbles in gold and emerging-markets stocks. The price of gold will double in the next decade, he said.

In his New York speech, Roubini repeated his assertion that asset prices have risen “too much, too soon, too fast.” He’s a New York University professor and chairman of New York research and advisory firm Roubini Global Economics.

The S&P-Goldman Sachs Commodity Spot Index is up 47% so far this year. Oil has risen 80% and gold is up 23%. The US economy grew 3.5% in the third quarter after shrinking since the second quarter of 2008. Government incentives that spurred consumers to buy homes and cars boosted the recovery, the Commerce Department said on Oct. 29.

Justifying Prices

“It is very hard to justify oil going from $30 to above $80 based only on the fundamentals of supply and demand,” Roubini said. Prices are “in part” a bubble, Roubini said.

Position limits on oil trading, if they helped reduce volatility, may be “beneficial” because the swings in oil prices have been “destructive” to the global economy, Roubini said.

Roubini predicted in 2006 the financial crisis that spurred more than $1.6 trillion of credit losses and asset writedowns at global financial companies.

The price of oil has gotten ahead of the economic recovery and is forming another “speculative bubble,” said Stephen Schork, president of consultant Schork Group Inc. of Villanova, Pennsylvania.

“I have no problem with the notion that $75 or $80 a barrel oil is a fair market value in a healthy economy, but we’ve got ahead of ourselves,” Schork said at the conference.

Oil rose 80 cents, or 1%, to settle at $80.40 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.