Prices will decline to $1,000 an ounce or even lower depending on the pace of growth in the U.S. and global economy, said Barnabas Gan, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. in Singapore. Any improvement in demand from China and India, the world’s two biggest consumers, probably won’t be enough to reverse the slide, Gan said.

Bullion slumped to the lowest level since April 2010 today as the dollar climbed to the strongest in more than five years against 10 major peers. The Federal Reserve is considering when to increase U.S. borrowing costs after ending asset purchases, while Europe and Japan are boosting stimulus to support their economies. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Societe Generale SA and ABN Amro Group NV are also predicting more losses.

“My forecast for next year is actually $1,000, but there’s a downside risk to that forecast as well,” Gan said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s John Dawson. “A lot of it depends on how strong the U.S. economy is going to be and how strong the dollar is.” His ranking as a forecaster is based on the eight quarters through September.

Spot gold fell as low as $1,132.16 an ounce, a level not seen in more than four years, before trading at $1,144.94 at 4:29 p.m. in Singapore. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index rose as high as 1,099.28 before trading at 1,097.64.

China, India

Prices will end the year at $1,100 and keep sliding to $800 by the end of 2015, Georgette Boele, an analyst at ABN Amro, wrote this week. The chances are increasing that the metal will slip to $1,000 as oil prices tumble and the U.S. economy improves, says Societe Generale’s Michael Haigh. Goldman Sachs’s Jeffrey Currie predicts $1,050 by the end of 2014.

China overtook India last year as the world’s largest gold consumer and together they represent more than half of global demand. Chinese demand shrank 52 percent to 192.5 metric tons in the second quarter from a year earlier partly because of a clampdown on corruption, according to the World Gold Council. Demand from India fell 34 percent in the first six months as the government curbed imports to protect the rupee.

Gan doesn’t expect a recovery in purchases from the two nations to stop the decline. “I won’t place my bets on higher gold prices because of the physical demand pickup,” he said.