US Debt Rose By $620 Billion During The Government Shutdown

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“This package demonstrates that we can govern without surrendering to big spending or letting Democrats dictate priorities,” wrote the House Freedom Caucus in some talking points released to the media.

“We successfully stiff-armed a massive omnibus spending bill; locked in disciplined, flat spending levels; preserved President Trump’s policy priorities… and kept our leverage for the next round in January.”

People can say whatever they want, but I’m pretty sure our politicians closed the US government for a record 42 days and changed absolutely nothing. That’s quite an accomplishment. Sublime ineptitude. Congressional approval ratings supposedly declined 11pts to 15% during the period. Remarkable.

If a trader knew that 85% of his decisions were losers, he’d become the richest man on earth by simply doing the exact opposite of his instinct. I’m guessing Pelosi made good money trading the chop, but the broad equity market ended the shutdown period roughly a percent higher than where it started.

Extrapolating the recent pace of deficit spending, the Federal government accumulated another $600bln of debt during the shutdown, adding more leverage to the system, sustaining the economy, supporting asset values.

But even so, 10yr treasury yields are unchanged from where they were before the shutdown.

Crypto prices got smoked, with bitcoin down roughly 16% for no particularly good reason, even as gold rose 5%.

Liquidity trades often need momentum to sustain them, and the hot money has been chasing AI and gold.

Beijing added roughly 62 gigawatts of electrical generation capacity to China’s grid while Washington remained closed. That’s roughly the generation capacity of the entire UK, once the world’s greatest power.

80% of China’s new generation capacity is renewables, which means that once its built, it requires no coal, gas, or oil imports to power data centers. That’s quite a competitive advantage in this existential race toward AGI.

But at least we have our democracy, which we’ve been told is the worst system except for all the others.