Research

US fiscal data tells a more textured story than either 'the deficit is exploding' or 'the deficit is under control' -- both oversimplify what the actual six-year trajectory shows. The federal deficit improved sharply from -14.48% of GDP at the pandemic peak (2020) to -5.27% by 2022, a genuine, large normalization. It then drifted modestly wider again, to -6.20% by 2024, before improving to -5.77% in 2025 -- a plateau, not a continued improvement and not a renewed crisis. Meanwhile, federal debt as a share of GDP has followed a noisier, oscillating path over the same period, rising net overall despite two distinct dips: from 120.4% in early 2022 down to 115.6% in early 2023, back up to 121.4% by late 2024, down again to 118.8% in mid-2025, and up to 122.6% by early 2026. The reason both can be true at once is basic debt arithmetic: even a 'merely' 5-6% deficit still adds to the debt stock faster than nominal GDP grows in most quarters.

17 July 2026 · 4 min read

The most recent IMF data complicates the 'de-dollarization' narrative rather than confirming it. In the first quarter of 2026, the US dollar's share of allocated global reserves rose to 57.13%, up from a revised 56.42% in the fourth quarter of 2025 -- driven roughly half by the dollar's own appreciation against major currencies, a valuation effect rather than a change in how central banks are allocating new reserves. The euro's share fell slightly to 20.03%. The presumed principal challenger, the Chinese renminbi, inched up to just 1.99% -- still, after more than a decade of predictions to the contrary, essentially negligible as a reserve currency. The real story in the data is gold. In 2025, gold's value in official reserve portfolios surpassed US Treasuries for the first time -- but the IMF itself attributes that shift almost entirely to gold's price appreciation, not to a surge in central bank buying.

17 July 2026 · 5 min read

This is the second edition of the Country Risk Series, and the first to move beyond the United States. The Euro Area's canonical dataset turns out to be genuinely rich -- 27 series -- and includes something the first edition explicitly could not: a full, seven-tenor sovereign yield curve, currently upward-sloping and showing no inversion, from 2.30% at three months to 3.62% at thirty years. Inflation tells a more nuanced story than a single snapshot suggests. Core HICP has held a stable, narrow range -- 2.2% to 2.7% -- for the past eighteen months. Headline HICP has not: it ran consistently below core through most of 2025, then spiked sharply higher in spring 2026, from 1.9% in February to 3.2% in May, before easing to 2.8% in June. Government debt stood at 87.8% of GDP as of the most recent annual reading, meaningfully lower than the US figure of 122.6% documented in Publication #4. The ECB's deposit facility rate stands at 2.25%, and M3 money supply growth registered 3.20% year-over-year in May 2026.

17 July 2026 · 6 min read

This is the launch edition of an ongoing Country Risk series -- a different format from the platform's first three publications, each of which was built around a single thesis. A country risk profile is a synthesis: growth, inflation, the labor market, fiscal position, banking conditions, and external balances, read together rather than in isolation, because risk assessment depends on how these dimensions interact, not on any one of them alone. Read together, the US picture as of mid-2026 is one of genuine strength alongside two specific, worth-naming tensions. Growth remains positive and above-trend by the OECD's own leading indicator. The labor market has improved from a November 2025 peak in unemployment. Governance and rule-of-law indicators remain strong by international standards. Against this, two tensions stand out: an unresolved divergence between the Federal Reserve's two inflation gauges, and a federal fiscal position -- 122.6% debt-to-GDP, a 5.77% deficit -- that this piece treats as structural context rather than an immediate risk trigger.

16 July 2026 · 6 min read

This is the first installment of an ongoing Global Liquidity Monitor. It is launched under that name deliberately, but scoped honestly: the platform's current data supports a genuine US dollar liquidity read, not yet a truly global one. Two distinct signals are worth tracking together. First, US M2 money supply has clearly accelerated through the first five months of 2026, after a full year of steadier growth -- a shift that coincides directly with the Federal Reserve's December 2025 decision to end quantitative tightening and begin stabilizing its balance sheet around an 'ample reserves' level. Second, the BIS credit-to-GDP gap has been gradually narrowing throughout 2025, moving from -12.59 percentage points in January to -11.54 in October, meaning credit growth has been slowly closing the gap with trend growth even while remaining below it. Neither signal alone would be conclusive; read together, they describe a liquidity environment that is genuinely loosening, gradually, from a below-trend starting point.

16 July 2026 · 5 min read

US bank deposits and loans have both grown steadily over the past eighteen months, but not at the same pace. Total deposits rose from $17,815bn in January 2025 to $19,435bn in July 2026 -- up roughly 9% over the window. Total loans and leases rose from $12,628bn to $13,854bn over the same period -- a similar magnitude of growth, but running consistently faster on a month-by-month basis. The result is a loan-to-deposit ratio that climbed fairly steadily from about 70.7% in early 2025 to a peak of 72.2% in March 2026, before easing back to roughly 71.8% over the most recent three months. That full trajectory -- a real, sustained rise followed by a modest recent pullback, not a single clean number -- is what this piece actually tracks, rather than a simplified before-and-after comparison that would understate both the peak and the recent reversal.

16 July 2026 · 4 min read

The United States dataset — 52 canonical series spanning growth, inflation, labor, credit, and fiscal position — currently tells two different stories about inflation at once. Core PCE, the Federal Reserve's own preferred gauge, has climbed steadily since November 2025, from 2.83% year-over-year to 3.41% in May 2026. Core CPI, computed from the platform's canonical index levels, has moved differently over the same window — not on a clean downward path, but choppy and range-bound, dipping to 2.47% in February before rising back to 2.82% in May and easing again to 2.57% in June. The gap between the two measures, in the same month of May, stands at 59 basis points — the widest point in the trailing eighteen months of data. That divergence, sustained for roughly seven months now rather than a recent blip, is the central finding of this piece.

15 July 2026 · 8 min read