MW Stop watching gold's daily swings and get ready for a $10,000 supercycle

By Louis Navellier

Louis Navellier: Gold prices will double by 2030 - making current volatility a distant memory

Louis Navellier offers two reasons for this belief in where gold is headed.

Investors seeking a portfolio hedge will have two choices: gold and the U.S. dollar.

While gold (GC00) is well off its highs of late January, I suspect the floor is about $4,500. But this is irrelevant. By the end of the decade, gold will be worth $10,000 an ounce, making today's volatility a distant memory.

The latest: Gold prices tumble below $5,000 as China holidays dent support

There are two reasons for this. First, population declines are placing downward pressure on prices. Second, while their orientation is focused almost exclusively on fighting inflation, central banks are not equipped to fight deflation. While the tools for combating deflation are limited and straightforward - currency devaluation and printing money through quantitative easing - central bankers are averse to implementing them.

As a result, the smart money - and all the money that follows the smart money - has lost confidence in central bankers, making gold the most logical and available hedge. When I say the smart money, I point to Ed Yardeni, whom I consider to be the smartest economist in the world, and who has a similar forecast for gold by the end of the decade.

From the archives (February 2025): Gold could hit $4,000 in 2026, this market pro says. Here's why.

Save the U.S. and India, none of the major economies or regions is exempt from population declines and the attendant impacts. What follows are the factors afflicting each region or market. While they are diverse, the overall trend is clear: There is a systemic, global and downward push on currencies and economies and an upward push on the price of gold because it represents the most likely, liquid and available hedge for this economic downdraft.

Cryptocurrencies: Among crypto's many attributes, it has emerged as an uncorrelated hedge against a declining economy. But the bloom is off the rose. Furthermore, bitcoin (BTCUSD), Ethereum (ETHUSD) and many crypto ETFs have had hideous bid/ask spread problems that are undermining the credibility of cryptocurrencies among large institutional and influential investors. These investors will migrate to gold.

The yuan: China's consumer-price index is almost exactly where it stood in mid-2022, and during 2025 the growth in prices was negative. Due to shrinking households stemming from the one-child policy enacted decades ago, China's domestic economy is in a decline that cannot be reversed. GDP growth has shrunk to 5% currently from 8.6% at the beginning of this century.

That's still a big number, but it's unsustainable, since it is driven by $1 trillion in exports to countries with their own deflationary problems. The only possible way China can stop its deflationary spiral is through a yuan (USDCNY) devaluation, which it did before it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. It remains to be seen if Beijing has the intestinal fortitude for this kind of radical action.

Japanese yen: The good news is Japan's birth rate per 1,000 people has ticked up in the last two years to seven per 1,000 people, and that's among the highest in Asia. The bad news is that the birth rate is not high enough to offset an acute population decline, and Japan is not very open to immigration. To put this into perspective, Japan's birth rate has declined every year since 1973, from 19.4 per 1,000 people, until it bottomed out 50 years later in 2023 at six.

As a result, Japan is losing households, which is making the payoff of government debt unlikely. Japan's debt, at 232% of GDP, is twice as large as its economy - and the cavalry is not coming anytime soon. The prime minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is spending heavily on defense and social security. This, in turn, is hindering the Bank of Japan, which is engaged in a massive program of quantitative easing - i.e., printing money - to make ends meet. The net result will be continued low interest rates and a depreciating Japanese yen (USDJPY).

The British pound: Britain used to assimilate immigrants well, and this boosted both its population and productivity. But now tensions over immigration are rising and are warping economic policies in a way that will likely depress GDP growth. Increased border protections exacerbate population decline, and labor shortages increase costs for business. Border policies at odds with those of the European Union, such as the movement of citizens and workers, are creating friction.

Compromised economic policies, combined with general economic malaise - today, one in five working-age Brits is claiming some form of subsidy from the state - will create what I fear is a downward spiral. Moreover, there is some evidence of a migration of British millionaires to the UAE, the U.S., Switzerland and Italy.

The widely cited figure is that 16,500 millionaires left the U.K. in 2025. This is a fraction of Britain's 2.6 million total millionaires, but when the "smart money" is going that's a canary in a coal mine. Facing Britain's shrinking population, growing welfare tab, and a loss of manufacturing and jobs, the Bank of England will have no choice but to slash key interest rates and enact quantitative easing, which will undermine the value of the British pound (GBPUSD) for a prolonged period.

The euro: The good news is that the European Union has grown to include 27 member countries. The bad news is Britain, which had never adopted the single currency, has left the union, and other countries could leave in 2027. Meanwhile, more anti-EU parties are expected to gain influence. The EU has become a bureaucratic octopus that threatens many industries, notably the agriculture and automobile sectors.

Furthermore, the EU is no longer just a monetary and trade union of nations. Instead, it has evolved into a shrewd political operator that does not bring the common interests of its member countries into alignment, but rather tries to regulate them. For example, the European Central Bank prevented Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni from declaring that the gold in the Bank of Italy belongs the Italian people.

The ECB had its reasons for this, and Italy capitulated, but the memory of it provides fodder for the argument that the yoke of the EU is undermining national freedoms. These freedoms are cherished by nationalists, in part because debt and economic-growth concerns are producing an "every man for himself" mentality as each EU member tries to solve its own problems. In the aggregate, poor GDP growth, debt, shrinking populations and endless infighting will erode the value of the euro (EURUSD).

Don't miss: Europe's military buildup could create a bond-market powerhouse that threatens U.S. Treasurys

The dollar: The U.S. is demographically superior to other countries discussed here because it is younger (with a median population age lower than almost all of the EU, Australia, Japan and China) and has a birthrate that is equal to or higher than every EU member. And the U.S. economy is growing nicely.

The U.S. population is divided into states, yes, but these states compete with each other using incentives and policies to attract newcomers, industries and households. This competition is a powerful driver of America's economic growth. The EU has competing states, too, but they are not bound together by a uniform set of laws, and, because of national identities, households and businesses do not migrate as easily.

Parenthetically, while deflation is not an immediate threat to the U.S., circumstances are fluid, especially with respect to population decline. While the U.S. population continues to grow, rising about 1% in 2024, the nation's fertility rate has remained below 2.0 since 2010.

Declines in currency and deflationary pressures in the world's largest economies leave investors with just two choices for hedging risk: gold and the U.S. dollar DXY. Since interest rates in the U.S. are anticipated to decline in the next few years, gold should become a much more popular investment - making $10,000 per ounce gold a realistic target by the end of the decade.

Louis Navellier is the founder and chief investment officer of Navellier & Associates.

More: 'I'm spooked': Gold is back, but is it a high-risk bet for retirement?

Also read: After bitcoin's fall, pity those wildly enthusiastic investors who borrowed billions against crypto

-Louis Navellier

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February 17, 2026 08:13 ET (13:13 GMT)

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