Ticker: Rare Tom Brady card up for auction; US economy grew 5.7% in 2021

One of just 20 special football cards featuring Tom Brady in the year he won his first Super Bowl is coming up for auction.

The 2002 Topps Finest X-Fractor card is expected to draw six figures, underscoring the hot market for memorabilia associated with the quarterback dubbed the GOAT, or Greatest of All Time, said Troy Thibodeau from Saco River Auction, in Scarborough, Maine.

The card was purchased in 2002 by a collector in Saco who took an interest in Brady’s connection to the Michigan football program, Thibodeau said.

“Although he had just won a Super Bowl, he wasn’t the Tom Brady that we know now,” he said. “No one thought Brady would become the GOAT.”

Another of the 20 sold for $75,000 but the card that Saco River Auction is putting up for sale on Jan. 31 is the only one to achieve the highest-grade offered by Professional Sports Authenticator, Thibodeau said.

No one is hotter than Brady for collectible sports cards. A signed rookie football card sold for $2.25 million last year. That was topped a few months later with another signed rookie card at $3.1 million.

US economy grew 5.7% in 2021

The U.S. economy grew last year at the fastest pace since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, bouncing back with resilience from 2020’s brief but devastating coronavirus recession.

The nation’s gross domestic product — its total output of goods and services — expanded 5.7% in 2021. It was the strongest calendar-year growth since a 7.2% surge in 1984.

The economy ended the year by growing at an unexpectedly brisk 6.9% annual pace from October through December, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

“It just goes to show that the U.S. economy has learned to adapt to the new variants and continues to produce,” said Beth Ann Bovino, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings.