Hello my friends, today is November 2nd and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week, not a great week in markets, we've got a lot of chop, but still some interesting things to talk about. First, this past week the UK government unveiled their new budget and the markets did not like it. Are the bond visionantes back again? Secondly, this past week we also had Treasury's quarterly refunding announcement, which was pretty uneventful, but they did show some interesting research between the intersection of Treasury market and crypto. Let's talk about what they're saying. And lastly, this coming week we have the very consequential November presidential elections in the US and markets are bracing for impact. Let's see what's in the price and what could be the potential market outcomes.
Alright, starting with the UK. Now before we start, let's level sit a little bit. Now over the past few years, the market governments have been barring a lot of debt and getting barring and spending, such that their debt to GDP has been steadily climbing and for the most part, the market really hasn't cared. To be clear, the relationship between fiscal deficits and market reaction, there's no hard and fast rule. It really varies. Every country is different and of course, market sentiment matters as well.
For example, let's say that a Latin American country stood up and announced that they would have fiscal deficits of about 7% for the foreseeable future. If they were to say that, I feel pretty confident that their bond yields will shoot up, their currency would depreciate and their stock market would tank. Basically classic fiscal crisis stuff. But at the same time, I say the United States does the exact same thing and nothing seems to happen.
Or for example, not too long ago, let's say in China, Chinese government and economies not doing very well, announced a big set of monetary and fiscal stimulus. The reaction to that, and as we've discussed before, when we have fiscal stimulus, you're basically just printing fiat currency. In a fiat system, sovereign debt is basically just interest that pays money that pays interest.
But when China does it, obviously, they're depreciating their currency, but you have a very strong reaction where the R&B strengthens and their stock market shoots up. The market is seeing that the economy is depressed and the government spending is going to stimulate the economy so create more growth. They're able to produce more goods and services, even as the government issues more debt.
In that case, again, more fiscal deficit, positive market reaction, positive currency reaction. Again, context really matters when you're making this judgment. Going to the UK, not too long ago in the UK, they had a mini fiscal crisis already. Minister Liz Truss, the Prime Minister at the time, announced a pretty loose fiscal budget, a whole bunch of tax cuts, and led to a bond market revolt that eventually required the Bank of England to step in and save the day.
And Liz Truss is no longer Prime Minister. So this past week, the policymakers there were on notice as to what could happen. So there was a lot of attention on the budget to be unveiled by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. The budget she unveiled was larger than the market expected. It was a pretty loose budget. They would say that it's to invest in the UK.
So how are you going to finance that? Again, part of it is going to be taxes and part of it is going to be debt issuance. Now the government there made notable hikes to taxes such that taxes as a percentage of GDP in the UK is going to go to all-time highs. But even that tax increase was not enough to finance the spending. So they also had issued a whole but they're anticipated to issue a whole bunch of debt higher than the market expects.
The market reaction to this was immediate. I guilt sold off, yields rose, and the pound depreciated and the equity markets did not like it. Again, overall the market reaction wasn't super intense like Delix Trust moment, but it did bear very clear signs of what you would say lack of confidence slash fiscal crises. So now taking a step back again. Now this behavior is something we seem to be seeing more and more.
Now just last month looking at their neighbor, France, they also soon be having some symptoms of some kind of fiscal issue. Now France has a fiscal deficit of about 6%. No surprise they have a very generous welfare system there and historically have had a pretty large fiscal deficit. But they're also very highly taxed. It's just that the tax revenue is not enough to pay for all the benefits. So when the Treasury official, Michelle Barney, announced their budget last month, including a whole bunch of tax increases, now the reaction seems to be higher bond yields. Again, there's going to be a muted currency reaction as they are part of the European Union, one part of a much, much bigger union.
Now if you look at French bond yields over the recent history, you notice that they've been steadily rising such that they are about the same level as Spanish yields. Now not too long ago, we had a European sovereign debt crisis and Spain was considered periphery. France was considered core. Now today France yields are about comparable to Spain. So you do see it seeming that the market is becoming more concerned about the debt by some countries.
Now I think one major concern of the market is growth. So again, looking at the Chinese example, when you use your whole bunch of debt, but you still have a lot of growth, then maybe the market is not as concerned because you could eventually have more goods and services produced and that could make the debt burden more manageable. But looking in the European countries, there's just not a lot of growth. And we've talked about this when we discuss the Draghi plan, a lot of the problem comes down to low productivity, which has to do with the relatively less advanced technology in the European Union. So again, technology is really what you need to be able to have productivity. If you have technology, again, you can produce more goods and services with the same amount of inputs.
Technology, looking across the world, big tech is largely in the US. AI largely in the US. Europe has some good technology companies as well, but it doesn't seem like there's as much technology there as well. And so that's really impacted their productivity. And so the market seems to be more and more concerned with what's going on there. Now, the market also seems to be somewhat concerned with what's happening in the US. Bony Utes have risen notably over the past few weeks. Part of that could be due to anticipated fiscal deficits in the event of a Trump victory. But note though, that even as Utes increase in the US, the dollar strengthens and the equity market does fine. So there's still, I think, confidence from the market in growth in the US that could potentially help pay off the debt.
But it seems like we're moving into a world where there are different fiscal regimes where the market is going to look at countries differently. And that's a big departure from the past and something that is definitely we should focus on going forward. All right. The next thing I want to talk about is this really interesting research done by the US Treasury, done by the Treasury Barring Advisory on the relationship between crypto and the Treasury market. So no, periodically we have the Treasury Barring Committee basically announcing their quarterly estimates as to how much money they're going to borrow. But at the same time though, they also announced research on questions that the Treasury is interested in.
And this quarter's questions was on the relationship between the Treasury market and crypto. And they have some pretty interesting findings. Now first off, one of the things that they're noting where they're trying to make that connection is that in the crypto market, there's a tremendous growth in stablecoins. All right. In the crypto world, people like to hold stablecoins, USD stablecoins specifically, and then use that as collateral or maybe just like a money market fund. Now one thing about these stablecoins is that they hold a lot of trad fine assets. Now the research notes that for example, looking at Tether, they seem to own a lot of Treasury bills and repo that I presumably is also backed by Treasury collateral as well.
So that's one potential linkage this research finds, whereas that as the crypto space grows, as the stablecoin universe grows, we could have a lot more stablecoins holding Treasury collateral to collateralize your stablecoins. And that could potentially be a stability issue because crypto was notoriously volatile. So you could have a lot of people, let's say, pouring into Tether or other stablecoins or withdrawing and that could internally lead to them buying or selling Treasury's. Now personally, I don't find this persuasive at all since bills are super liquid, but it is one thing that they pointed out as a potential nexus.
Now the next interesting thing they talked about, interestingly talked about is how distributed ledger technology could potentially be applied in the Treasury market. So the way that things work right now in the Treasury market is that there is just one ultimate ledger that records all the securities that records all the Treasury securities and it's held at the Federal Reserve. So for example, let's say that the US government issues a security, well, the person who owns that security, his name is recorded in a database controlled by the Federal Reserve. But in practice, though, you're not really eligible to be recorded in that database. The database is only open to specific participants, for example, to banks.
So what actually happens in practice is that if I buy a Treasury security, then a custodian bank holds it and the custodian bank then turns around and records it on the Fed's ledger. So on the Fed's ledger, it will show the custodian bank owning the Treasury and on the custodian banks ledger, it will show me owning the Treasury. So it is a centralized system and there are different levels to it, kind of similar to our payment system. Now one way we could have this distributed ledger technology come and improve the Treasury market is we would make it if we would make it as if everyone was on just one ledger. So instead of, let's say, being worried about errors that the custodian bank could have on their ledger or maybe the Fed could have, what if everyone was on one ledger and then maybe that could have some kind of efficiencies. And maybe these could be programmable such that you could revolutionize some products that are related to Treasury like repo.
Now in repo, again, let's say that I'm blending cash receiving Treasury as collateral. Maybe there could be some kind of smart contract where I could specify the types of Treasuries that I'm willing to receive as collateral. Maybe I only, I don't want self as too liquid or maybe I don't want self that has too much interest rate risk. And maybe I want to program at such that I get my money back specific time the next day. Right now that stuff is done again through the custodian banks platform or negotiate through a broker. But if I could have some kind of smart contract programming in, then maybe that again saves costs, makes it more efficient. Maybe it makes it more secure as well. So those are potential ways that you could have this distributed ledger technology come and help the Treasury market.
Well, but one other thing that I noted was that in thinking about this, the researcher is pretty confident that the type of treasury type of technology that would use would definitely definitely be private ledger and definitely not be permissioned and private. So in thinking about these ledger technologies, you can think about it. It could be like Bitcoin where it's a public ledger. One can see what transactions are happening, totally transparent. And in addition, it could be permissionless like Bitcoin where anyone can set up a node and validate transactions.
So that kind of decentralized thing is one of things that is very attractive to this kind of technology because if it's decentralized, no one can control it. Maybe people feel safer with it. The findings in this research was pretty adamant that if we do have something like this, it definitely has to be private and it definitely has to be permissioned. The rationale for this is that, well, if you have a decentralized ledger, it's vulnerable to hacking. I don't know if that's true. It seems like Bitcoin manages fine. But I think the other point is that if it's decentralized, the government would say that there's a lot less, let's say, there's a lot more compliance issues. So there's a lot less safety and so forth.
You could potentially have money laundering and so forth going forward to this. But ultimately, it's probably about maintaining control over the system. For example, let's say that we had a decentralized permissionless system. Even when the government didn't like someone and wanted to cut them out of, say, the treasury market or something like that, they wouldn't be able to do that. So at the end of the day, if there is some kind of decentralized ledger technology when it comes to the treasury market, it will ultimately still be, even though it's a distributed ledger, it will still be centralized among certain key participants.
So the government would still be able to have control and do what they want. So that kind of makes this whole thing a lot less interesting in the sense that I'd probably never be able to just have some kind of tokenized treasury where you could individually transact and send it to someone else. If there is distributed ledger technology, it would be in the back end among certain participants used to save costs for them. And the last thing I want to talk about is the upcoming presidential election. So right now, the betting market slightly favored Trump. And looking at the polls, Nate Silver, again, very, very good analyst on the subject in his motto also gives Trump the slight edge. But again, it's only a slight edge. The race really seems to be based on these measures to be more or less a coin toss.
But the outcomes though, depending on who wins, could be very different. There's a lot of analysis that suggests that a president Trump victory would suggest much higher fiscal deficits and the return of more tariffs, whereas a vice president Harris victory would be more of the status quo. Now, the suggests that Trump victory would have meaningful impact on the markets. For example, if we were to have much higher fiscal deficits, that obviously suggests higher interest rates. The market seems to be sensitive to that. And of course, President Trump famously measures his performance by the stock market. So I would expect him to do things to try to top the stock market up. President Trump has also noted to be very friendly towards Bitcoin. So you could see higher crypto prices. And of course, because President Trump is vocal about his love for tariffs and did use a lot of tariffs his first term, that could have impacts on currency after all. It seems like when President Trump puts tariffs on another country, their currencies don't do well.
And because there is this potential here in the markets, we see the markets bracing for impact. Now, looking at, for example, the VIX, the VIX is pretty elevated at about 20, even though the equity markets are not too far from all time highs. Now, VIX is a measure of implied volatility, which is just basically the cost of an option. It seems like the market is paying up to hedge for potential outcomes. Not just in case, let's say, we have a context as the election or it draws on for some time, such that there's equity downside. But maybe we have significant upside as well through the outcome of the election, which is something that I'm going to write about this week. Now, if you look at the interest rate markets, so looking at the move index, which is like the VIX for interest rate markets, the VIX, the move index is constructed based on implied volatility on interest rate futures.
You also see the move index very elevated. Of course, if we do have a present Trump victory, and in addition to that, if the Republicans control Congress, you could really see the potential for significant deficit spending and the interest rate markets simply bracing for that, where you could see, say, a much more hawkish Fed due to increased fiscal spending and also increased term Crimea sending the 10-year yield higher. Looking at FX markets, you see the implied fall in the USD and Mexican currency pair also pretty elevated. Now, one thing that happened during Trump's first term was through all this tariff negotiations and so forth, we did see the Mexican pace of depreciate. And so if you have tariffs, say, on the European Union or so forth, that's going to be negative for EU growth. It's going to lead to more dovish monetary policy over there and likely big currency moves.
So I would think that if we did have it from victory, we would have a notably stronger dollar. So there's potential, again, this Tuesday that for us to have, find out what happens and further to be really, really big market moves. And certainly that's what the market is bracing for. Also note, though, that we could have not much happening and so all this volatility premium comes out of the markets. And historically, that's also been some fuel that could move markets as well. So again, this Tuesday, coming Tuesday, prompts us to be a very, very exciting week and I personally can't wait. And also, of course, this coming week, we have Fed, but honestly, who's thinking about that, but I'll still come back and offer my Fed debrief. So in any case, that's all I prepared for today.