My friends, today is October 19th and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week, we had another pretty good weekend markets, S&P Vllef 100 at a new all-time highs. Now, remember not too long ago, we were talking about how seasonally this is not a good time for markets, but I guess it just powers through. Let's see if we can continue. Now today, let's talk about three things. First, there's some interesting policy diversions emerging among global central banks, and that seems to be driving some currency impact. Let's talk about what's happening there.
Secondly, now something really interesting is happening in the political markets. The past week, it seems like the political markets are increasingly confident of a Trump win and maybe, maybe a potential red sweep. And that seems to be showing up in certain markets as well. Let's talk about what happened last week in politics. And lastly, so I heard this really interesting podcast on macro museums from Professor Emilio Cambio, a professor in Argentina talking about the case for dollarization in Argentina and how they got to where they are today. Let's talk about some interesting things from his paper.
Alright, starting with central bank divergences. So this past week, we got some more really good economic data in the US. Now, not too long ago, people were worried about a US recession. Then we had a blockbuster jobs report and people stopped worrying about that. Now, this past week, we got a consumer spending data and it was really good. Actually, it blew way past expectations. US consumers continued to spend. And that's probably going to continue as long as the stock market goes higher. Now, with all this good data, the Atlanta GDP now is now revising upwards. It's forecast for US GDP, too, comfortably above 3%.
Now, that is leading the interest rate markets to price in fewer Fed cuts. Now, not too long ago, the market was thinking that we might get another 50 basis point cut either in November or December. And then the markets began to think we'll just get to 25 basis point cuts for the rest of the year. And now there's some slight chance of the Fed just maybe skipping November. Now again, slight chance. We do have some Fed presidents talking about, hey, you know, the economy is doing better than I thought. We got to lower rates deliberately again, again, but I think the base case continues to be 225 basis point cuts, although fewer cuts next year. So overall, the US economy appears to be doing better than expected. And so the market is pricing in fewer cuts over the next couple years.
Now, at the same time, though, there's a different story happening in other regions of the world. Now, looking up north in Canada, now recent CPA data in Canada shows that inflation is actually low 2% over there. And there are some concerns of economic growth. And so the market is now thinking that maybe the Bank of Canada would cut by 50 basis points when it meets the next week. Now looking over in Euroland, starting with the UK, now UK CPI has also been coming in a bit lower than expected. Now that is also leading the market to increase its expectations of cuts from the Bank of England. Now, this past week, the ECB met and they cut rates again.
Now, what's happening in the Eurozone is similar to what's happening in the other countries. Inflation is lower than expected, right? Looking at headline, it's already below 2% largely due to energy prices. But at the same time, their economy is not doing this well. Remember, we've talked about the PMI data over there. It looks like growth is becoming softer. And ECB officials have been more and more concerned about just poor growth. And so the market is thinking that they will cut again in December as well. So on the one hand, as the US is becoming outperforming, on the other hand, many other countries are underperforming. And so that's leading to a whining diversions and policy expectations and leading to surprising dollar strength.
Now, not too long ago, again, Fed market was pricing in aggressive Fed cuts. On top of that, massive deficits, dollar was weakening a lot. And now, the past couple of weeks, we've seen substantial dollar strength thing with EuroUSD below 1.1. And of course, the dollar index just spiking now. I don't know if that's going to continue, but it is a notable divergence that we've seen in recent weeks. But part of that dollar strength thing, though, may not just be due to monetary policy divergence, but there are also political dimensions as well.
So this past week, we've had a really big surge in the odds of a Trump victory in betting markets. Right now, the markets are strongly fair, being a Trump victory. Now, to be clear, these are markets can be moved by small bets as some people have noted. But then again, if you look at the history of Pauline market, you notice that it was around 50, 50 for some time. It's really the past week that things have changed. And of course, there are also other betting markets as well, like predicted that also show an increasing Trump victory and Nate Silver's motto, although having both candidates at 50, 50 has steadily moved up Trump's odds.
Now, what's happening seems to be that as the candidates communicate more with the public, people are beginning to feel that vice president Harris probably is not the best. The chances are not as good. So remember, in the beginning of Harris's candidacy, she didn't speak very much. And she had a very good debate performance. But as we approach the finish line to the election, she's be giving more and more interviews, most recently, an interview on Fox News. It's only 20 minutes. I encourage you to watch it yourself. But that seems to be the interview that that seemed to convince many people that, you know, vice president Harris might not win.
I don't think this should be surprising to people. Now, remember in vice president Harris also wanted to be president in 2020. She ran in the Democratic primary, did very poorly, totally rejected by Democratic voters. And so she had to drop out. Now, this time around, again, there was no real competitive primary. She was basically installed by party insiders. But she's still the same person. And it seems like she's still not very popular. And as people began to listen to her speak more and more, I think people become, I guess increasingly aware of why she's was not able to make it through the primary the first time.
Now, looking beyond the presidency, we also have, again, the Senate and the House. Now in the US, we have the legislators divided into two houses, the Senate and the House. Now, the Senate elections is staggered term. So every election cycle, only some only some Senate seats are up for election. Now, this time around, the Senate math makes it very likely that the Republicans will will keep the Senate that that's not really anyone, anything people talk about. But the House, though, it's a lot less certain. Now, I think the odds favor, according to people I've read, the odds favor, the Democrats taking the House.
But if you have a president that is winning by a lot, you know, the odds are that the president will also, the president's party will also take the House as well. Because the way oftentimes people vote is that they don't actually know who their, you know, congressmen or House representative is. They just vote for the president and then go down the ballot and vote for, let's say, let's say you're voting for Trump, then just go down the ballot and vote for the sky who says he's a Republican and you just vote for him. You have no idea who he is. You don't really follow these congressional politics. But, you know, you just vote along party lines. And so oftentimes the president's party also does well in the House. And so if you have the Trump increasingly likely to win it and maybe by a lot, again, these are preliminary and they can change all the time, then it increases the odds of a Republican sweep, which opens up the door to big, big policy changes.
Now, looking in markets, you can also see that, you know, the market is pricing and it seems like some popular Trump trades are being priced in. For example, I look at Bitcoin. Now Trump famously wanted to be a Bitcoin president, very open to crypto. You can donate to Trump in crypto. And so Bitcoin is seems to be surging. Another very obvious Trump trade is DJT, Trump's media company. Again, declined a lot far from far from its all-time highs. But, you know, in the past couple of weeks has really surged. And I'd say the quintessential Trump trade is equity. So like everyone knows that Trump measures his performance by how the stock market is doing and the stock market is surging.
Now, again, so there are many markets that have different impacts on the Trump trade. I would say that it's often thought that Trump would be bad for the bond market. We've seen the 10-year yield rise come to be above 4%. But I think that that's not that much priced in. And I think what I'll write about this week is just what a red sweep means to the interest rate market.
Now, beyond that, though, looking at economic policy, one of the Trump's signature policies is, of course, tariffs. As he says, as he suggests, it's his favorite word in the dictionary. Now, if you listen to what Trump talks about when he talks about tariffs, he had a lengthy interview with Bloomberg News the past week. It's really clear that he views tariffs as a negotiating tool. So if you studied economics in school, like I did, people will all tell you that tariffs are not good, free trade is good, you know, everyone's a well better off and so forth.
But if you look at the economic performance over the past few decades, you know, a lot of people in the Midwest will say, well, you know, because of free trade, I have no job, right? And so my life is stringing out better. And if you look at China, well, you know, they don't really have free trade there. Right. If you are American business, you want to sell in China, not that easy. But if you're a Chinese business and you want to sell into the US, really easy. And as you can see, many things are made in China here in the US. And during those past few decades, China grew tremendously, right? Created millions and millions of jobs, raised hundreds and millions of people out of poverty. So obviously this free trade thing, which they did not do, seemed to work for them.
And so I think a lot of people are questioning the dogma that people have been taught in school. You know, maybe that's, that's not the whole story. Or maybe that's just not true. Now what Trump is saying in his free trade policy is that he wants to use tariffs as a negotiating tool to get businesses to build in America. So the US is the largest consumer market in the world, right? We are the client. And so the client has power. The Chinese, the Europeans, they want to sell to American consumers. In fact, for many of them, that's their business model. Now, if you're the client, you have bargaining power. And so what Trump would do is, as he's saying, is that, Hey, you want to sell the American consumers no problem, but you have to build factories in America, create jobs, and then you can have access to US consumer market. And if you don't do that, we're just going to put huge tariffs on you so that you can access US markets. And so that's his strategy. It's not so much that he just, you know, wants to wall off the US from the world, is that he wants to trade deficit in the US to close.
For example, the US buys much, much more stuff from your land than it sells to them, much, much, much, much, much more stuff from China than it sells to them. So he wants this to be a bit more equal either. Well, the US can sell more goods to China and or, of course, these Chinese companies, European companies, build factories in the US. And I think that's probably going to work because the US obviously has a market people wants to access. And of course, other countries are not doing so well.
And to be clear, people have been doing this for a few decades. Remember, like the US used to be very angry at Japan for exporting tons of stuff there. And now Japan builds lots of factories in the US manufacturing cars and so forth. But that also has implications on currencies and global growth. So part of the dollar strength we talked about earlier seems to be that the market is becoming increasingly aware of the possibility of higher tariffs against, say, Euroland in China.
Now, if the market, if if that happens, then you can expect economic growth to be worse in your land, more rate cuts and a weaker Euro currency. So again, this will be a shock to global growth in the longer run. Maybe maybe we do actually rewire the global trade system, such that more things are made in America, but it will be it will first be a shock. And before we see any medium or longer term results. Now, the last thing that I want to talk about is this really interesting discussion I heard on a macro musings about Argentina.
Now, many of you may not know, but in the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was actually a very wealthy country. Things were going really well for them. And Argentina has tremendous amounts of land, rich and natural resources. And so everyone thought that Argentina would be, you know, future rich country. But that didn't really happen. In fact, if you look at this chart from the professors, from the professors paper, you'll see that over the past few decades, Argentina has had tremendous amounts of stacklation.
So GDP growth per capita basis, very negative inflation tremendously high. In fact, the cycle, Argentina is comparable to places like Zimbabwe. Now, what seemed to have happened over the past century is that you increasingly have politicians who are short term in their thinking. So what they'll do is they'll go to power, they'll try to buy votes, they'll try to spend a whole lot of money to get elected and then, you know, continue to do so. Now, in order to get inflation and so forth under control, you kind of needed to have less spending or maybe tighter monetary policy. But that was all something that came at an economic cost that people did not want to pay.
And so you have this culture where there's increasingly, I guess short termism. And then again, you also have the erosion of things like the rule of law, independence of monetary policy that just led to basically a century of poor growth and high inflation. So that kind of reminded me of some of the things that I'm seeing in the US, but actually before we get to that. So the professor actually made some interesting observations in this case about dollarization. First, he notes that, you know, in Argentina, when you have to buy a real property, you know, you actually already pay in dollars. And in fact, because of the high inflation, a lot of people keep their savings in dollars.
Now dollars not in a bank account, but in currency. So interesting fact that in the US, over, there's over two trillion dollars worth of currency. And the most common building omniscient is actually not 20s or 10s, which is what we see in everyday life, but actually hundreds. And there's some interesting work from the University, from the Chicago Fed, that the bulk of currency in terms of value is actually held abroad. Now in Argentina, the professor notes that, you know, when you're thinking about liquid assets, the grass majority of liquid access is actually in dollars, but it's not in a bank, it's locked away in safe deposit boxes or under the mattress or something like that.
This is because in the early 2000s, when people actually did keep money dollars in banks, the government basically took it, and forcibly, forcibly converted it. So in order to be able to get inflation under control, the professor's point is that we have to somehow control the government to make sure that the government behaves in ways that are long-term good and not just short-term opportunism. In order to do that, we have to be able to bind the government's power to spend.
And the way that he's thinking is through dollarization, again, you country, foreign country, can't print dollars. And so that's a way to make sure that the government will behave at least a little bit more responsibly. And if you look at other countries who did this, let's say Ecuador or El Salvador, it seemed to be able to get inflation, at least improve it significantly. Now, to be clear, the governments in those countries have at times wanted to be able to de-utilize so that they can have more power, maybe to spend more money to help in their elections and so forth.
But it seems like the people were in part able to resist it. And so from his viewpoint, it seems that the most important way is being able to have these kind of commitment mechanisms so that politicians cannot misbehave. Now, the newly elected president over there, President Millet, has done a good job in getting inflation under control. There's this new graph from Bloomberg. You can see that inflation is now three and a half percent, but I would say three and a half percent on a monthly level, not annual. Monthly inflation has gone down to 3.5 percent. Analyze that, you still get a very, very big number. So things are improving over there when it comes to inflation.
Now then that kind of brings me back to our recent election. So again, you're looking at the case of many emerging countries. The economic situation is largely downstream from their political situation. So when I see, say, President Trump going to Las Vegas and telling everyone that it will for me and I won't tax tips, vote for me, I'll cut your taxes, or say, President Vice President Harris saying that, well, for me, and I'll give you money to buy houses, I'll forgive your student loans and so forth, now it seems like that's increasingly like the politics that you would see in many emerging markets, where politicians behave opportunistically, trying to buy votes, get elected without regard to the longer term consequences.
Now I think of the economy as downstream to politics. So we are increasingly politically, I think, moving towards a world where we are basically becoming open the door to a stackflation. And I think that's becoming increasingly apparent in markets as well. Looking at the price of gold, it's just surging upwards. Part of it could be geopolitical risk. We don't know when Israel retaliates against Iran. Looks like it'll happen anytime. But I think that something to be aware of. And I think that the economy is downstream from politics and the politics is becoming increasingly stackflationary.