The Fiscal Year Closed $2 Trillion Short
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12 OCTOBER 2026
By Mike Leesponsored The Wealth Protection Playbook |
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Three Numbers to Start
$2.0tn | the federal deficit for the fiscal year that ended on 30 September, $218 billion more than the year before. |
2.4% | gold’s gain over the past twelve months at Friday’s close. On 29 January the figure was 95.6%. |
14 Oct | Wednesday, when the September inflation report and next year’s Social Security raise arrive together. |
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The Fiscal Year Closed $2 Trillion Short
The Congressional Budget Office put the deficit for fiscal 2026 at $2.0 trillion last Thursday, $218 billion more than the year before. Revenue rose $169 billion. Spending rose $386 billion, and interest on the debt was one of the lines that pushed it up.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called it the highest deficit on record outside a war or a recession. The CBO’s own projections put net interest above $1 trillion this year, which makes the cost of carrying old debt one of the largest lines in the budget, and that line grows with every auction at today’s yields.
The bond market has priced that arithmetic for weeks. Long Treasury yields reached their highest levels since 2002 last Wednesday, and a strong 30-year auction on Thursday pulled them lower. Treasury markets close today for Columbus Day, while stocks trade.
On Wednesday the September consumer price index lands at 8:30am Eastern, together with next year’s Social Security adjustment. Two weeks later the Fed decides whether to raise rates again. Debt and inflation sit on the same calendar, and both reach a retirement account through what it holds.
Cedar Gold Group’s free playbook starts from those two pressures and explains how retirement savings can move into physical gold. The mechanism is a transfer. When one IRA custodian sends money straight to another, no tax is due and nothing is withheld, and the IRS rule that limits 60-day rollovers to one a year does not apply. The account keeps its tax treatment, and the asset inside it changes. A custodian holds the metal in an approved depository, and the gold sits in your name inside the IRA.
Gold’s Twelve-Month Gain Shrank to 2.4%
Gold futures for December closed at $4,216.30 on Friday, up 1.4% on the day as Treasury yields eased and the dollar weakened. Over the past month the metal lost 5.4%, and it sits about 24% below its late-January record.
The twelve-month number tells the story of 2026. On 29 January gold traded 95.6% above its level a year earlier. By Friday that gap had narrowed to 2.4%. Central banks kept buying through the slide, and added 289 tonnes in the second quarter.
Silver ran ahead on Friday, up 2% to about $60.40, and the VanEck gold miners fund rose almost 3%. On Polymarket, bettors on Friday evening gave 68% odds that gold touches $4,300 before the end of October and 57% odds that it dips to $4,100. Both can happen in the same month, and that two-way traffic matters more to an income investor than the direction.
Bullion pays no income, so a flat year leaves a holder of bars with nothing to show for it. Volatility is the part of gold that still pays. A fund that sells call options against gold collects a premium up front, and that premium rises when the price swings. A 24% fall in eight months and 1.8% moves like Friday’s are what option buyers pay for.
The shareholder never touches an option. The fund passes the premium through as cash, and the weekly-pay versions deposit it every Friday, which turns a stalled metal into a paycheque.
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TSMC Reports a Record Quarter on Thursday
Taiwan Semiconductor reported September revenue of NT$511.9 billion last week, up 54.6% from a year earlier. That puts third-quarter revenue at NT$1.49 trillion, about $46.7 billion, a record and roughly 51% above the same quarter last year. The company has raised its growth outlook for 2026 to slightly above 40%.
Analysts polled by LSEG expect third-quarter net profit to rise 64% to NT$740.8 billion. The Taiwan-listed shares are up about 61% this year and the American depositary receipts about 55%, so the market has already priced a strong quarter and will trade on what management says comes next.
The full results arrive on Thursday, 15 October, and the part worth listening for is light. TSMC said in September that it is on track to start production of co-packaged optics before the end of this year. Industry forecasts reported by the Taipei Times put silicon photonics at more than half of the optical transceiver market next year.
Co-packaged optics moves the optical engine off a plug-in module at the edge of a switch and onto the same package as the chip, so the electrical signal travels millimetres instead of inches. Nvidia’s photonics switches, built with TSMC among its partners, ship in their Ethernet version this year.
Optics are replacing copper inside AI data centres because light moves more data over longer distances on less power. TSMC says its photonic engine is more than ten times as power-efficient as copper-based links. ASML, which supplies the lithography machines TSMC prints its chips with, reports on the same day. Lumentum, which makes the lasers, said last week that its output is committed through nearly 2029.
The world’s largest contract chipmaker gives the light-based part of the AI build-out its biggest stage of the quarter on Thursday. Jason Bodner names the one stock he rates first in it, and gives it away free.
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What Is Scheduled
14 Oct | the September consumer price index and the 2027 Social Security adjustment, both at 8:30am Eastern. |
15 Oct | TSMC’s third-quarter results and its outlook for the rest of the year, with ASML reporting the same day. |
28 Oct | the Fed’s rate decision, five days before the midterm elections. |
ad It explains how eligible retirement funds may be moved into physical gold using an IRS-approved process, while preserving the tax advantages of the account. Claim your copy of the guide |
From 95.6% to 2.4%
2.4% | gold’s twelve-month gain at Friday’s close, down from 95.6% in late January. The metal has stopped compounding for now. It still swings, and the swing is where gold income comes from this autumn. |
Forget the hot picks — own assets that keep paying while the headlines argue. Because the best trade you’ll ever make is the loss you never took. Mike LeeDeals CatchersThanks for reading. See you tomorrow. |
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