Washington borrowed nearly $2 trillion last year with unemployment near 4%, a gap between spending and taxes once seen only in recessions and their aftermath.
In recent years, deficits have helped stock investors more than they have hurt them, while bond investors have endured most of the cost.
Deficits put upward pressure on interest rates, but their estimated impact is far smaller than typical forecasting errors.
Massive Deficits Are Here to Stay
Every few months, a new headline reminds investors that Washington spends far more than it collects. The latest came on October 16, when the Treasury reported that the federal government ran a $1.99 trillion deficit in the fiscal year that ended in September. That was the largest in five years and $217 billion more than the year before. A Treasury official put the shortfall at about 6.2% of gross domestic product (GDP).
What makes the number unusual is not its size alone but its timing. Since 1950, the US ran deficits of 6% of GDP or more only in a recession or in the years just after one, until 2023. This year it did so with the unemployment rate at 4.2% (Figure 1). For investors who recall learning that governments should save in good times so they can spend in bad ones, that is unsettling. It is fair to ask whether it should change how you invest. Our answer: it should shape your expectations, but it is a poor signal for timing the market.
How We Got Here
The arithmetic of this year’s deficit is simple. Federal revenue rose 3%, while outlays rose 6%, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).1 Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense all grew. But the largest increase in dollar terms came from net interest on the public debt, which climbed $115 billion, or 11%, to about $1.14 trillion.
Policy choices added to the gap. CBO estimates that the 2025 budget reconciliation act raises deficits by $4.7 trillion over 2026 – 2035, including added interest costs. In its February estimate, CBO expected higher tariffs to offset about $3 trillion of that.2 So far tariffs have brought in less than hoped: customs duties fell 11% this year to $172 billion, partly because of roughly $130 billion of refunds following a Supreme Court ruling against some of the levies.3
Going forward, a key point is what drives the deficit’s growth. In CBO’s current-law projections, the gap between spending and taxes before interest, known as the primary deficit, narrows from 2.6% of GDP in 2026 to 2.1% in 2036. Yet the total deficit widens from 5.8% to 6.7%, because net interest rises from 3.3% of GDP, about $1 trillion, to 4.6%, about $2.1 trillion (Figure 2).4 In other words, the deficit increasingly feeds on itself. The government pays interest on past borrowing, and it borrows to pay that interest.
That is why interest rates matter so much to the outlook. CBO’s projections assumed a 10-year Treasury yield of 4.1% this year. The market has not cooperated: the 10-year yield was 5.1% on October 16 (Figure 3). In a recent letter, CBO estimated that if rates ran 1.5 percentage points above its baseline, deficits over 2026 – 2036 would be $6 trillion larger. Even a half-point increase would add $1.9 trillion.5
Who Wins When Washington Borrows?
Here is the part of the story that may be underappreciated. When the government spends more than it collects, the difference does not disappear. It becomes income for someone else: households receiving benefits, companies selling goods to the government or to those households, and investors receiving interest. The circular flow of income across sectors implies an accounting relationship, sometimes called the Kalecki-Levy profits equation, in which government borrowing shows up as private-sector income. As a matter of accounting logic, much of the deficit ends up as corporate profit unless households save it or it leaks abroad through imports.6
The data support that idea. From 1950 through 2007, after-tax corporate profits averaged a little over 6% of GDP, while federal deficits averaged under 2%. Since 2008, profits have averaged about 10.5% of GDP and deficits about 6% (Figure 4). James Montier of GMO spent years arguing that high profit margins would fall back to their old averages. In a 2023 paper reviewing why that had not happened, he concluded: “It transpires that fiscal deficits have been the culprit.”7
Two cautions are in order. First, this is an accounting identity, not proof that deficits cause profits. In recessions, the relationship can run the other way, as deficits jump while profits fall. Second, it explains profits for the corporate sector as a whole, not why particular companies thrive. Still, it helps explain one of this decade’s striking features. Since the end of 2019, $100 invested in the S&P 500 has grown to about $262 with dividends reinvested, an annualized return of roughly 15.6% (Figure 5).
Who Pays?
The same flood of borrowing that has supported profits has weighed on bonds. The Treasury must sell more debt each year to finance the gap, and investors have demanded elevated yields to absorb it, especially as inflation returned. A fund of intermediate-term Treasury securities turned $100 at the end of 2019 into about $96 by September 2026 on our estimate, after falling as low as $86 in late 2023 (Figure 5). That is a poor result for an asset many savers hold for safety.
Part of the extra yield investors now demand reflects what economists call the term premium: the additional return required for tying money up in a 10-year bond rather than rolling over short-term Treasury bills. The Federal Reserve’s Kim and Wright model estimates of that premium stood at about 0.91 percentage points on October 30.8 Rising debt is one reason, according to academic research. Inflation, which ran at 3.7% over the 12 months to September, is another. Credit rating agencies have noticed too. Moody’s lowered its US rating to Aa1 from Aaa in May 2025.9
There is a silver lining for savers. The interest the government pays is income for the people and institutions that hold its debt, including money market funds, pension plans, and individual savers. Net interest of more than $1.1 trillion a year flows to holders of Treasury bills and bonds, including households holding cash and short-term bonds. Higher yields hurt existing bondholders when they arrive, but they raise the income every new dollar invested in bonds can earn.
None of this points to a near-term default. The US borrows in its own currency, issues the world’s main reserve asset, and has deep domestic markets. The more realistic risk is a slow squeeze: higher interest bills crowd out other spending, while bond investors earn returns that barely keep pace with inflation.
Why Not Trade on It?
If deficits are large and rising, why not simply sell bonds and wait for yields to climb? Because the effect, while real, is modest compared with everything else that moves interest rates.
Recent research from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that each additional percentage point of debt-to-GDP raises expected long-term rates by about 3 basis points (0.03 percentage points).10 Applied to CBO’s projected increase in debt held by the public from about 101% of GDP in 2026 to 120% in 2036, that implies roughly 0.6 percentage points of upward pressure on long-term rates, spread over a decade and all else equal.
Compare that with how wrong rate forecasts typically are. CBO’s own review found that its five-year forecasts of the 10-year yield have missed by about 1.2 percentage points on a typical basis, and that forecasters tended to overpredict rates from the early 2000s until the pandemic, then underpredicted them after 2020.11 A 2015 White House survey of long-term interest rates found that private forecasts made 10 years ahead missed by 2.7 percentage points on a typical basis.12 And since 2020 the actual 10-year yield has ranged from a monthly low of 0.62% in July 2020 to 4.99% in September 2026 (Figure 6).
The 2015 survey provides its own lesson. The administration forecast it cited put the 10-year yield at 4.4% in 2025, close to that year’s 4.3% average yield. But to get there, yields first fell to well under 1% in 2020, a detour the survey did not anticipate. The forecast was right on the destination and wrong about the journey, and investors live through the journey.
What It Means for Investors
Big deficits are a regime to plan around, not a signal to trade on. Four implications follow.
First, don’t let deficit headlines push you out of stocks. Persistent deficits have supported corporate earnings, and history shows that markets can climb for years while debt worries mount. The bigger risk to earnings is a rapid fiscal cleanup that sharply cuts the deficit, the very outcome deficit hawks want. That is worth weighing, but it is politically unlikely in the near term.
Second, expect bonds to pay you for holding them, but not much more. With the 10-year Treasury yielding around 5%, today’s starting yields are far higher than in 2020, so income can do more of the work. But a larger supply of debt and a higher term premium argue against expecting big price gains from long-term bonds. Spreading maturities, rather than concentrating in the longest bonds, lowers exposure to any single interest-rate path.
It also helps to separate the level of the deficit from its direction. Growth and profits respond mainly to changes in fiscal policy, not the deficit’s size. A deficit that stays near 6% of GDP adds little new stimulus from one year to the next, and CBO’s projection of a slowly narrowing primary deficit implies a mild drag rather than a boost. Markets would move on a sharp change in either direction: a large new spending or tax-cut package, or a serious effort to close the gap.
Third, keep some protection against inflation. Deficits this large leave less room to respond to the next shock, and consumer price inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal, which the Fed measures with a related price index. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities and real assets can serve as insurance.
Fourth, watch the right signals. Rather than the size of the deficit, which changes slowly, watch how markets absorb new debt: weak demand at Treasury auctions, sudden jumps in the term premium, and a weakening dollar on fiscal news would signal that investors’ patience is wearing out.
The $2 trillion deficit is real, and it is likely to grow. But the lesson of the past six years is that deficits have redistributed returns more than they have destroyed them. A diversified portfolio built for several outcomes represents a better answer than betting on any one scenario.
William P. Sterling, Ph.D.,
Global Strategist
1 Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review: September 2026 (October 8, 2026). CBO estimates customs duties and roughly $130 billion in tariff refunds. 2 CBO Director Phillip Swagel, statement on The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (February 11, 2026). The act is P.L. 119-21. Excluding added interest costs, the act increases primary deficits by $3.7 trillion over 2026 – 2035. CBO’s tariff estimate includes interest and economic effects.
3 Reuters, “US fiscal 2026 budget deficit rises to $1.99 trillion, largest in 5 years,” October 16, 2026. This article reports $145 billion of tariff refunds based on Treasury data; the $130 billion figure is CBO’s estimate.
4 CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (February 11, 2026). Components may not sum to totals because of rounding. Projections show current law and are not forecasts of future legislation.
5 CBO, Projections of Deficits and Debt Under Two Scenarios with Higher Interest Rates (October 8, 2026). CBO notes the estimates hold other economic variables at baseline levels and that the full budgetary effect depends on why rates rise.
6 The relationship, associated with economist Michał Kalecki and the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, is an identity from the national income accounts: profits equal net investment plus the government deficit, minus household saving, minus foreign saving (approximately the current-account deficit), plus dividends. Identities describe how the accounts balance; they do not establish causation.
7 James Montier, “The Curious Incident of the Elevated Profit Margins: Part I, The Macro Drivers,” GMO, May 2023.
8 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Term Premium on a 10-Year Zero Coupon Bond (Kim-Wright model). Term-premium estimates are model-based and vary across models.
9 Moody’s Ratings, “2025 United States Sovereign Rating Action,” rating lowered to Aa1 from Aaa on May 16, 2025.
10 Michael Plante, Alexander W. Richter, and Sarah Zubairy, “Revisiting the Interest Rate Effects of Federal Debt,” NBER Working Paper 34018, July 2025. The estimate (3.18 basis points per percentage point of debt-to-GDP in the baseline) applies to the five-year Treasury rate five years ahead; roughly three-quarters reflects the term premium. Debt figures: CBO, October 8, 2026 letter (100.6% of GDP in 2026, 120.2% in 2036).
11 CBO, CBO’s Economic Forecasting Record: 2025 Update (July 2025). CBO dates the overprediction from the early 2000s until the 2020 pandemic. Root-mean-square error of five-year-average forecasts of the 10-year Treasury rate, 1984 – 2020 sample; two-year forecasts show an error of 0.8 percentage point.
12 “Long-Term Interest Rates: A Survey,” White House, July 2015. The 4.4% figure for 2025 is the administration’s forecast as reported in the survey. Root-mean-square error of long-range private-sector forecasts against the 10-year yield realized 10 years later, forecasts made since 1996.
This represents the views and opinions of GW&K Investment Management and does not constitute investment advice, nor should it be considered predictive of any future market performance. Data is from what we believe to be reliable sources, but it cannot be guaranteed. Opinions expressed are subject to change. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Indexes are not subject to fees and expenses typically associated with managed accounts or investment funds. Investments cannot be made directly in an index. Index data has been obtained from third-party data providers that GW&K believes to be reliable, but GW&K does not guarantee its accuracy, completeness or timeliness. Third-party data providers make no warranties or representations relating to the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the data they provide and are not liable for any damages relating to this data. The third-party data may not be further redistributed or used without the relevant third-party’s consent. Sources for index data include: Bloomberg, FactSet, ICE, FTSE Russell, MSCI and Standard & Poor’s.
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Global Strategist William Sterling examines what a nearly $2 trillion federal deficit means for stocks, bonds, interest rates, inflation, and portfolio diversification.
The $2 Trillion Question
What Big Deficits Mean for Your Portfolio
Global Perspectives | November 2026
Highlights
Massive Deficits Are Here to Stay
Every few months, a new headline reminds investors that Washington spends far more than it collects. The latest came on October 16, when the Treasury reported that the federal government ran a $1.99 trillion deficit in the fiscal year that ended in September. That was the largest in five years and $217 billion more than the year before. A Treasury official put the shortfall at about 6.2% of gross domestic product (GDP).
What makes the number unusual is not its size alone but its timing. Since 1950, the US ran deficits of 6% of GDP or more only in a recession or in the years just after one, until 2023. This year it did so with the unemployment rate at 4.2% (Figure 1). For investors who recall learning that governments should save in good times so they can spend in bad ones, that is unsettling. It is fair to ask whether it should change how you invest. Our answer: it should shape your expectations, but it is a poor signal for timing the market.
How We Got Here
The arithmetic of this year’s deficit is simple. Federal revenue rose 3%, while outlays rose 6%, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).1 Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense all grew. But the largest increase in dollar terms came from net interest on the public debt, which climbed $115 billion, or 11%, to about $1.14 trillion.
Policy choices added to the gap. CBO estimates that the 2025 budget reconciliation act raises deficits by $4.7 trillion over 2026 – 2035, including added interest costs. In its February estimate, CBO expected higher tariffs to offset about $3 trillion of that.2 So far tariffs have brought in less than hoped: customs duties fell 11% this year to $172 billion, partly because of roughly $130 billion of refunds following a Supreme Court ruling against some of the levies.3
Going forward, a key point is what drives the deficit’s growth. In CBO’s current-law projections, the gap between spending and taxes before interest, known as the primary deficit, narrows from 2.6% of GDP in 2026 to 2.1% in 2036. Yet the total deficit widens from 5.8% to 6.7%, because net interest rises from 3.3% of GDP, about $1 trillion, to 4.6%, about $2.1 trillion (Figure 2).4 In other words, the deficit increasingly feeds on itself. The government pays interest on past borrowing, and it borrows to pay that interest.
That is why interest rates matter so much to the outlook. CBO’s projections assumed a 10-year Treasury yield of 4.1% this year. The market has not cooperated: the 10-year yield was 5.1% on October 16 (Figure 3). In a recent letter, CBO estimated that if rates ran 1.5 percentage points above its baseline, deficits over 2026 – 2036 would be $6 trillion larger. Even a half-point increase would add $1.9 trillion.5
Who Wins When Washington Borrows?
Here is the part of the story that may be underappreciated. When the government spends more than it collects, the difference does not disappear. It becomes income for someone else: households receiving benefits, companies selling goods to the government or to those households, and investors receiving interest. The circular flow of income across sectors implies an accounting relationship, sometimes called the Kalecki-Levy profits equation, in which government borrowing shows up as private-sector income. As a matter of accounting logic, much of the deficit ends up as corporate profit unless households save it or it leaks abroad through imports.6
The data support that idea. From 1950 through 2007, after-tax corporate profits averaged a little over 6% of GDP, while federal deficits averaged under 2%. Since 2008, profits have averaged about 10.5% of GDP and deficits about 6% (Figure 4). James Montier of GMO spent years arguing that high profit margins would fall back to their old averages. In a 2023 paper reviewing why that had not happened, he concluded: “It transpires that fiscal deficits have been the culprit.”7
Two cautions are in order. First, this is an accounting identity, not proof that deficits cause profits. In recessions, the relationship can run the other way, as deficits jump while profits fall. Second, it explains profits for the corporate sector as a whole, not why particular companies thrive. Still, it helps explain one of this decade’s striking features. Since the end of 2019, $100 invested in the S&P 500 has grown to about $262 with dividends reinvested, an annualized return of roughly 15.6% (Figure 5).
Who Pays?
The same flood of borrowing that has supported profits has weighed on bonds. The Treasury must sell more debt each year to finance the gap, and investors have demanded elevated yields to absorb it, especially as inflation returned. A fund of intermediate-term Treasury securities turned $100 at the end of 2019 into about $96 by September 2026 on our estimate, after falling as low as $86 in late 2023 (Figure 5). That is a poor result for an asset many savers hold for safety.
Part of the extra yield investors now demand reflects what economists call the term premium: the additional return required for tying money up in a 10-year bond rather than rolling over short-term Treasury bills. The Federal Reserve’s Kim and Wright model estimates of that premium stood at about 0.91 percentage points on October 30.8 Rising debt is one reason, according to academic research. Inflation, which ran at 3.7% over the 12 months to September, is another. Credit rating agencies have noticed too. Moody’s lowered its US rating to Aa1 from Aaa in May 2025.9
There is a silver lining for savers. The interest the government pays is income for the people and institutions that hold its debt, including money market funds, pension plans, and individual savers. Net interest of more than $1.1 trillion a year flows to holders of Treasury bills and bonds, including households holding cash and short-term bonds. Higher yields hurt existing bondholders when they arrive, but they raise the income every new dollar invested in bonds can earn.
None of this points to a near-term default. The US borrows in its own currency, issues the world’s main reserve asset, and has deep domestic markets. The more realistic risk is a slow squeeze: higher interest bills crowd out other spending, while bond investors earn returns that barely keep pace with inflation.
Why Not Trade on It?
If deficits are large and rising, why not simply sell bonds and wait for yields to climb? Because the effect, while real, is modest compared with everything else that moves interest rates.
Recent research from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that each additional percentage point of debt-to-GDP raises expected long-term rates by about 3 basis points (0.03 percentage points).10 Applied to CBO’s projected increase in debt held by the public from about 101% of GDP in 2026 to 120% in 2036, that implies roughly 0.6 percentage points of upward pressure on long-term rates, spread over a decade and all else equal.
Compare that with how wrong rate forecasts typically are. CBO’s own review found that its five-year forecasts of the 10-year yield have missed by about 1.2 percentage points on a typical basis, and that forecasters tended to overpredict rates from the early 2000s until the pandemic, then underpredicted them after 2020.11 A 2015 White House survey of long-term interest rates found that private forecasts made 10 years ahead missed by 2.7 percentage points on a typical basis.12 And since 2020 the actual 10-year yield has ranged from a monthly low of 0.62% in July 2020 to 4.99% in September 2026 (Figure 6).
The 2015 survey provides its own lesson. The administration forecast it cited put the 10-year yield at 4.4% in 2025, close to that year’s 4.3% average yield. But to get there, yields first fell to well under 1% in 2020, a detour the survey did not anticipate. The forecast was right on the destination and wrong about the journey, and investors live through the journey.
What It Means for Investors
Big deficits are a regime to plan around, not a signal to trade on. Four implications follow.
First, don’t let deficit headlines push you out of stocks. Persistent deficits have supported corporate earnings, and history shows that markets can climb for years while debt worries mount. The bigger risk to earnings is a rapid fiscal cleanup that sharply cuts the deficit, the very outcome deficit hawks want. That is worth weighing, but it is politically unlikely in the near term.
Second, expect bonds to pay you for holding them, but not much more. With the 10-year Treasury yielding around 5%, today’s starting yields are far higher than in 2020, so income can do more of the work. But a larger supply of debt and a higher term premium argue against expecting big price gains from long-term bonds. Spreading maturities, rather than concentrating in the longest bonds, lowers exposure to any single interest-rate path.
It also helps to separate the level of the deficit from its direction. Growth and profits respond mainly to changes in fiscal policy, not the deficit’s size. A deficit that stays near 6% of GDP adds little new stimulus from one year to the next, and CBO’s projection of a slowly narrowing primary deficit implies a mild drag rather than a boost. Markets would move on a sharp change in either direction: a large new spending or tax-cut package, or a serious effort to close the gap.
Third, keep some protection against inflation. Deficits this large leave less room to respond to the next shock, and consumer price inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal, which the Fed measures with a related price index. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities and real assets can serve as insurance.
Fourth, watch the right signals. Rather than the size of the deficit, which changes slowly, watch how markets absorb new debt: weak demand at Treasury auctions, sudden jumps in the term premium, and a weakening dollar on fiscal news would signal that investors’ patience is wearing out.
The $2 trillion deficit is real, and it is likely to grow. But the lesson of the past six years is that deficits have redistributed returns more than they have destroyed them. A diversified portfolio built for several outcomes represents a better answer than betting on any one scenario.
William P. Sterling, Ph.D.,
Global Strategist
1 Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review: September 2026 (October 8, 2026). CBO estimates customs duties and roughly $130 billion in tariff refunds. 2 CBO Director Phillip Swagel, statement on The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (February 11, 2026). The act is P.L. 119-21. Excluding added interest costs, the act increases primary deficits by $3.7 trillion over 2026 – 2035. CBO’s tariff estimate includes interest and economic effects.
3 Reuters, “US fiscal 2026 budget deficit rises to $1.99 trillion, largest in 5 years,” October 16, 2026. This article reports $145 billion of tariff refunds based on Treasury data; the $130 billion figure is CBO’s estimate.
4 CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (February 11, 2026). Components may not sum to totals because of rounding. Projections show current law and are not forecasts of future legislation.
5 CBO, Projections of Deficits and Debt Under Two Scenarios with Higher Interest Rates (October 8, 2026). CBO notes the estimates hold other economic variables at baseline levels and that the full budgetary effect depends on why rates rise.
6 The relationship, associated with economist Michał Kalecki and the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, is an identity from the national income accounts: profits equal net investment plus the government deficit, minus household saving, minus foreign saving (approximately the current-account deficit), plus dividends. Identities describe how the accounts balance; they do not establish causation.
7 James Montier, “The Curious Incident of the Elevated Profit Margins: Part I, The Macro Drivers,” GMO, May 2023.
8 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Term Premium on a 10-Year Zero Coupon Bond (Kim-Wright model). Term-premium estimates are model-based and vary across models.
9 Moody’s Ratings, “2025 United States Sovereign Rating Action,” rating lowered to Aa1 from Aaa on May 16, 2025.
10 Michael Plante, Alexander W. Richter, and Sarah Zubairy, “Revisiting the Interest Rate Effects of Federal Debt,” NBER Working Paper 34018, July 2025. The estimate (3.18 basis points per percentage point of debt-to-GDP in the baseline) applies to the five-year Treasury rate five years ahead; roughly three-quarters reflects the term premium. Debt figures: CBO, October 8, 2026 letter (100.6% of GDP in 2026, 120.2% in 2036).
11 CBO, CBO’s Economic Forecasting Record: 2025 Update (July 2025). CBO dates the overprediction from the early 2000s until the 2020 pandemic. Root-mean-square error of five-year-average forecasts of the 10-year Treasury rate, 1984 – 2020 sample; two-year forecasts show an error of 0.8 percentage point.
12 “Long-Term Interest Rates: A Survey,” White House, July 2015. The 4.4% figure for 2025 is the administration’s forecast as reported in the survey. Root-mean-square error of long-range private-sector forecasts against the 10-year yield realized 10 years later, forecasts made since 1996.
William Sterling, Ph.D.
Global StrategistDisclosures
This represents the views and opinions of GW&K Investment Management and does not constitute investment advice, nor should it be considered predictive of any future market performance. Data is from what we believe to be reliable sources, but it cannot be guaranteed. Opinions expressed are subject to change. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Indexes are not subject to fees and expenses typically associated with managed accounts or investment funds. Investments cannot be made directly in an index. Index data has been obtained from third-party data providers that GW&K believes to be reliable, but GW&K does not guarantee its accuracy, completeness or timeliness. Third-party data providers make no warranties or representations relating to the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the data they provide and are not liable for any damages relating to this data. The third-party data may not be further redistributed or used without the relevant third-party’s consent. Sources for index data include: Bloomberg, FactSet, ICE, FTSE Russell, MSCI and Standard & Poor’s.