by Gary Alexander
January 21, 2026
This column was posted on Tuesday, January 20, 2026, the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s first day in office. Ironically, during the same month a year ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came out with their mandated 10-year projections, using their foggy crystal ball, predicting 1.9% GDP growth in 2025, down from the 2.3% rate in 2024, and 1.8% annual growth for each of the following nine-years.
Once again, this supposedly non-partisan gaggle of PhD economists got it all wrong. After a slow first-quarter – one in which Biden’s old policies dominated – we have seen GDP growth of over 4% in the last three-quarters of 2025 – more than twice the CBO’s grumpy predictions. And the Federal Reserve did even worse, as their 400 “non-partisan” PhD economists predicted only 1.7% GDP growth in 2025.
The Atlanta Fed is smarter than most other Fed branches when measuring GDP since they calculate all the components of the GDP to create a model of what’s actually happening, so their track record is usually better than the “experts.” For the final-quarter of 2025, they see a 5.3% annualized growth rate, vs. a morbid 1% growth rate forecasted by an average of the usually clueless “Blue Chip Economists.”
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Also, I must note, Louis Navellier nailed the 2025 growth rate far more accurately than the CBO in his December 24, 2024 column here, calling for 4% growth in 2025 and 5% GDP growth in 2026.
Turning to inflation, the government-funded pundits in the DC swamp were also way off base. At the start of 2025, the Fed forecast 2.9% inflation – not too scary, but all through 2025, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and other Fed governors kept warning of rising inflation rates coming soon due to the President’s various rounds of tariffs, but at the end of the year 2025, inflation was 2.7%, lower than any of the Biden years.
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
In the markets, stocks averaged 17% gains, precious metals soared, while crypto-currency, oil and the dollar faded:
Upon viewing these dramatic precious metals increases in 2025 (continuing so far in 2026), I would like to hearken back to America’s 125th year – halfway on the road toward our 250th birthday celebration.
America’s “Halftime Show” (And What a Show!) Under Teddy Roosevelt
Midway between 1775 and 2025, the 1900 election featured a battle between gold and silver interests with Gold Bugs winning. Then, shortly into William McKinley’s second-term, he succumbed to gunshot wounds suffered in Buffalo, while Vice President Teddy Roosevelt was on an Adirondacks mountain hike.
In the prologue of a new book by Bret Baier – his sixth-presidential biographic profile – we read of guides finding Teddy Roosevelt when the President was near death. Then, the daring outdoors-men chartered a rickety coach to take him 35-miles, from midnight to dawn, in the rain, to catch a morning train to Buffalo to be sworn in.
We’ve had some outspoken mavericks as president, like Jackson, Truman, Trump and Teddy Roosevelt. Not to stretch any analogy too far, Teddy Roosevelt was a divisive figure who said the darnedest things in public and strove to break the box of presidential norms to smithereens. For instance, tradition called for the serving president to STAY HOME, always, never to travel abroad, but Roosevelt broke this silent ban when he sailed to Panama to supervise the building of his canal project, telling aides, “I’m off for the ditch.”
Bret Baier said this was “the first time in the nation’s history a sitting president had set foot outside its borders.” The New York Times headline read like a reprimand: ‘His Voyage Violates the Traditions of the United States for Over a Hundred Years.’ Strange to imagine today, but many commentators were horrified by the idea of a president leaving our shores…to mingle with monarchs and the like.”
At the dawn of the 20th Century, Teddy Roosevelt was determined to “Make America Great,” echoing part of a future slogan by Reagan and Trump. To make his point clear, he sent the Great White Fleet (painting over those old Battleship Grays) around the globe to show off our new might. The fleet returned home when Teddy Roosevelt had only 10-days left in his second-term. Friend and historian Owen Wister, summarized Teddy Roosevelt’s impact briefly:
“He had sent our battle fleet round the world…had accomplished the Panama Canal; had brought peace between Russia and Japan; had put the Kaiser in his place regarding Venezuela … settled the coal strike; saved the forests; developed irrigation in the West; laid the law’s restraining hand upon Corporations and Unions; upon railroad rebates and free passes, and upon the sale of unsanitary food and drugs.” – Owen Wister, quoted in “To Rescue the American Spirit: Teddy Roosevelt and the Birth of a Superpower” by Bret Baier (2025), Chapter-12, “America’s Ascent”
The Role of Gold (and Silver) During Our Greatest Half Century of Growth
One major engine for America’s phenomenal growth spurt from 1879 to 1929 was gold. Those were the years of a pure 100% gold standard in America, but there was also a great division of wealth, engendering the Democrats’ powerful drive for a bi-metallic (silver) standard, to boost the “poor man’s gold” over all those Golden Eagles and Double Eagles dominating the established banking and East coast fortunes.
In mid-1900, a clever writer from the midland, L. Frank Baum, published a popular parable in May, early in the 1900 election year, sponsoring the silver interests, represented by a farmer’s daughter (Dorothy), a tin-man (industrial worker), scarecrow (farmer) and a cowardly lion, the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, who orated against a “cross of gold,” but lost two-straight elections to the Gold Bugs.
Back in 1900, readers of The Wizard of Oz were well aware of the allegories in Baum’s book. In his text (not matched by the Technicolor film in 1939), Dorothy wore silver (not red) slippers on her jaunt down the Yellow Brick Road, paved with gold-bars, to the Emerald (green paper money) capital city of Oz.
The universal term for ounces, then as now, is Oz. In Baum’s book, before Dorothy and her trio could enter the Emerald-Greenback City and see the Wizard, they were ordered to wear green-colored glasses.
This story of Oz has been told many times, but a new (2025) book, “A History of Money: A Story of Humanity,” by David McWilliams, a former Irish central banker, ties many minor threads together. He writes about the division of wealth during the strongest growth spurt of the era, the Industrial Revolution.
The silver interests demanded a 16-to-1, gold-to-silver price ratio, even though the market price at the time was double 16 – at 32-to-1. This debate has resonated in price swings since last May, when silver traded at a 100-to-1 ratio ($3,200-gold to $32-silver). In just eight-months, the ratio has been cut in half, to 51-to-1 ($90-silver vs. $4,590-gold). There are several fundamental reasons for silver’s surge, with limited new supplies meeting increased industrial demand (notably for AI data-centers), and now the fruits of the trade war, with China putting severe limits on the amount of silver they will clear for exports in 2026.
As gold and silver return to prominence in the private investment world – without any official new gold standard – we are now entering a time capsule back to when Americans fought over the dollar’s integrity.
All content above represents the opinion of Gary Alexander of Navellier & Associates, Inc.
Also In This Issue
A Look Ahead by Louis Navellier
Is Another Regime Change Coming Soon – This Time in Iran?
Income Mail by Bryan Perry
Kevin Warsh Has the “Chops” To Be Our Next Fed Chair
Growth Mail by Gary Alexander
Trump 2.1 Shocks the Pessimistic Pundits
Global Mail by Ivan Martchev
The Great Rotation Continues
Sector Spotlight by Jason Bodner
The Market Surge May Be Signaling a Coming Explosion in Growth
View Full Archive
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About The Author
Gary Alexander
SENIOR EDITOR
Gary Alexander has been Senior Writer at Navellier since 2009. He edits Navellier’s weekly Marketmail and writes a weekly Growth Mail column, in which he uses market history to support the case for growth stocks. For the previous 20-years before joining Navellier, he was Senior Executive Editor at InvestorPlace Media (formerly Phillips Publishing), where he worked with several leading investment analysts, including Louis Navellier (since 1997), helping launch Louis Navellier’s Blue Chip Growth and Global Growth newsletters.
Prior to that, Gary edited Wealth Magazine and Gold Newsletter and wrote various investment research reports for Jefferson Financial in New Orleans in the 1980s. He began his financial newsletter career with KCI Communications in 1980, where he served as consulting editor for Personal Finance newsletter while serving as general manager of KCI’s Alexandria House book division. Before that, he covered the economics beat for news magazines. All content of “Growth Mail” represents the opinion of Gary Alexander
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