Demand for gold has increased significantly among households in China. This trend likely reflects the strong rally in gold prices, concerns about the ongoing decline in home prices, and worries about deflation and the weakening of the yuan, see chart below.
Almost 90% of stablecoin use is crypto trading, which will likely continue to grow.
The big breakthrough will be if US dollar stablecoins will be used for retail payments globally.
If the US dollar stablecoin market grows into the trillions, it will significantly grow demand for US T-bills.
There are financial stability risks because money will be moved around quickly if depositors lose confidence in a stablecoin issuer.
For more discussion, see our chart book here.
The total addressable market for European direct lending to large-cap companies is enormous. Ninety-six percent of firms in Europe with revenue greater than $100 million are private, see chart below.
A growing share of US household assets is owned by people age 55 and above, see chart below. A contributing factor is the aging of the population, as there are more and more people in this age group.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if AI results in permanently higher GDP growth and permanently lower inflation, it could solve the US fiscal problem, see chart below.
To calculate CPI inflation, BLS teams collect approximately 90,000 price quotes every month covering 200 different item categories, and there are several hundred field collectors active across 75 urban areas.
When data is not available, BLS staff typically develop estimates for approximately 10% of the cells in the CPI calculation. However, the share of data in the CPI that is estimated has increased significantly in recent months and is now above 30%, see chart below.
In other words, a rising share of prices going into the CPI at the moment are guesses based on other data collections in the CPI.
If you had invested $1 million in the S&P 500 on January 1, 2021, your return today would be $660,000, of which more than half would have come from the top 10 biggest companies in the index, see chart below.
The bottom line is that returns in the S&P 500 are not diversified but instead remain extremely concentrated in a small group of tech stocks.
AI will continue to have a dramatic impact on all our lives, but the question remains whether the Magnificent 7 are correctly priced, and if they will even be the best AI investments over the next five to ten years.
Academic papers quantifying the impact on 10-year interest rates of a one percentage point increase in US government debt-to-GDP find an effect of 3 basis points, see chart below.
The CBO forecasts that US government debt-to-GDP over the coming decade will increase by roughly 20 percentage points, and the estimates below imply that this will permanently increase 10-year interest rates by 60 basis points.
If 3,000 people are deported every day, the labor supply will decline by about 1 million in total in 2025.
Combined with additional immigration restrictions, job growth is slowing down.
If legal immigration continues at current levels and illegal immigration declines to zero, the new level of monthly nonfarm payrolls will be 72,000.
Deportations and immigration restrictions are likely to increase wage growth in agriculture, construction, and leisure & hospitality.
Deportations and immigration restrictions lower demand for housing.
The bottom line is that immigration policy has implications for labor supply, nonfarm payrolls, wages, and housing demand. To better understand these effects, we have compiled a chart book, which is available here.
The dollar has depreciated more in the first half of 2025 than yield differentials would have predicted, see charts below and the chart book available here.
Regression models indicate that this was due to the trade war and economic policy uncertainty, including concerns among foreign investors about Section 899 and the Mar-a-Lago Accord.
Looking ahead, with Section 899 behind us and the trade war likely to be resolved within the next couple of weeks, the US dollar is expected to appreciate again.
Renewed strong appetite for US assets after Liberation Day is also visible in the Treasury International Capital data for May.
