budget

The U.S. Treasury Department stated that the U.S. budget deficit and spending in October reached historical records for the month.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury released data showing that as of September 30, the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2026 totaled $2 trillion, an increase of $217 billion from the previous fiscal year, representing a 12% increase. The deficit for fiscal year 2026 accounts for 6.2% of GDP, and the total federal debt held by the public reached 100% of GDP.

According to Cointelegraph, the French National Assembly voted down the "revenue" portion of the national budget for 2027 on Wednesday evening, resulting in the removal of three cryptocurrency-related amendments that had previously been included in the bill. These amendments will no longer be part of the version of the bill that will be submitted to the Senate, but there is still a possibility that they could be reintroduced during the Senate review stage in the future.The National Assembly had previously passed three amendments related to cryptocurrency. On October 16, lawmakers passed an amendment that included the profits generated from exchanging cryptocurrencies for stablecoins within the scope of taxation. On Tuesday, lawmakers passed another amendment requiring taxpayers to declare their self-custodied crypto assets; if the total reaches or exceeds 100,000 euros (approximately 112,000 dollars), it must be declared, with the assessment benchmark date being December 31 of the tax year.Additionally, another amendment proposed that if cryptocurrency platforms fail to provide relevant information as required by tax authorities, the amount of fines they face will increase from 10,000 euros to 50,000 euros.

U.S. President Trump stated that if the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, we can achieve budget balance.

The French National Assembly has once again postponed the vote on the revenue portion of the 2027 national budget, marking the second delay of this vote. According to the notice of the end of the parliamentary session, Tuesday's agenda includes questioning the government and continuing the debate on the revenue portion of the budget, with 758 amendments still pending review. The vote originally scheduled for October 20 was postponed due to over 2,000 amendments awaiting debate. The Assembly must complete the first reading by midnight on November 17; if the revenue portion is rejected, the government's original budget proposal will be submitted directly to the Senate without the amendments approved by the members.Regarding cryptocurrency taxation, lawmakers rejected two proposals last Friday. The first proposal aimed to include cryptocurrency assets in France's current exit tax system, with a voting result of 27 votes in favor, 55 votes against, and 1 abstention. The second proposal sought to tax unrealized gains on household cryptocurrency assets valued over 800,000 euros (approximately 897,000 USD), applicable to taxpayers who have been French tax residents for at least 6 of the past 10 years, with a voting result of 31 votes in favor and 60 votes against.Other cryptocurrency-related proposals are still pending debate, including a requirement for taxpayers to report self-custodied cryptocurrency assets with a total value of at least 100,000 euros (approximately 112,000 USD) to the tax authorities based on year-end value; and an exemption from related capital gains tax if the total amount of cryptocurrency payments used for goods and services during the tax year does not exceed 1,000 euros (approximately 1,120 USD). The Assembly passed a proposal on October 16 to tax gains when cryptocurrency assets are exchanged for fiat currency-backed stablecoins, but this measure has not yet become law.

According to Journal du Coin, France's 2027 budget bill was submitted to the National Assembly on October 1, and the Finance Committee began voting on ten cryptocurrency amendments starting October 7. As of October 8, three have been approved: the inclusion of stablecoin exchanges as taxable events (effective January 1, 2027), a departure tax applicable to crypto assets exceeding 800,000 euros, and the ability to defer crypto losses for ten years; a proposal to expand the personal wealth tax to include crypto assets was rejected; a tax reduction amendment submitted by Paul Midy was ruled invalid for violating Article 40 of the Constitution (which prohibits reducing public revenue).In addition, the EU DAC8 directive will require platforms to collect user identity and transaction data starting January 1, 2026, and will report to tax authorities for the first time by June 15, 2027, taking effect without a parliamentary vote. Another proposal aims to require reporting for self-custody wallets valued over 100,000 euros, with a maximum fine of 10,000 euros for non-compliance. The aforementioned amendments have not yet become law, and the full assembly will review them from October 13 to 19, with the final vote scheduled for November 17.

The U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimates that the total federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2026 will be $2 trillion, an increase of $218 billion from fiscal year 2025.Revenue is expected to increase by $169 billion, while spending is projected to rise by approximately $386 billion, with the increase in spending primarily coming from net interest on debt, welfare programs, defense, and education.

According to a report by Phoenix Technology citing Reuters, French Minister for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad stated on Tuesday that the European Union should use the billions of euros in fines imposed on Google to reduce member states' contributions to the EU budget. Haddad, in an interview with a French news channel, said: "This is a new source of income for the EU, amounting to 4.6 billion euros, and this funding should be used to automatically lower the contributions of all member states."In July of this year, Google was fined a total of 890 million euros for violating EU regulations aimed at curbing the power of large tech companies, equivalent to about 1.01 billion dollars. The recent fines have brought the total amount of fines imposed on Google by the EU for anti-competitive behavior over the past two decades to 10.38 billion euros. EU countries are currently negotiating the budget for 2028 to 2034, with the European Commission proposing a budget scale of 2 trillion euros, accounting for 1.26% of the EU's gross national income, of which about 168 billion euros will be used to repay loans raised for the post-pandemic recovery fund.

A proposal from the Lido governance forum aims to authorize a conditional LDO centralized exchange liquidity provision plan to reduce the risk of LDO trading pairs deteriorating or being delisted due to insufficient liquidity. The plan may provide up to $1.5 million worth of retrievable LDO inventory from the Lido DAO treasury (with a cap of 7.5 million LDO), and additionally allocate up to 480,000 USDC for fixed service fees and related costs for a maximum of 12 months.This authorization will expire if not activated within two years and will only be initiated when the Lido Growth Committee determines that CEX liquidity is insufficient or may become insufficient. The forum disclosed that the average daily trading volume of LDO over the past 90 days was approximately $34 million, down from $43.8 million in the previous 90 days and about $95.4 million during the same period in 2025. The proposal emphasizes that the plan aims to maintain bilateral liquidity and the continuous listing of trading pairs, is not intended for price manipulation, and currently does not specify any particular market makers or exchanges.

The National Assembly Budget Office of South Korea released a report stating that stablecoins could save South Korean merchants between 370 billion and 5.15 trillion Korean won (approximately 275 million to 3.8 billion USD) in payment processing fees each year. The report also warned that the widespread adoption of stablecoins could weaken banks' role as credit intermediaries and disrupt token pegs during large-scale redemptions. It suggested introducing reserve requirements, limiting stablecoin rewards, and strengthening regulation of tokens that may threaten financial stability. Regarding the issuance rights of stablecoins, there are differences between the Bank of Korea and the Financial Services Commission: the Bank of Korea prefers issuance to be dominated by bank-controlled issuers (holding at least 51%), while the Financial Services Commission believes excessive restrictions may hinder innovation. In addition, South Korea plans to expand the scope of tokenized securities by February 2027, with subsequent phases connecting blockchain-based securities markets to stablecoin payment infrastructure. A study released by the Bank of Korea earlier this month also found that directly trading USD stablecoins with local currency on Binance could depress the local currency exchange rate.

According to Money Today, the South Korean government has budgeted 27.5 billion Korean won per rack for NVIDIA's next-generation AI chip Vera Rubin, which is higher than previous estimates by foreign media. The Ministry of Science and ICT's budget for GPU server expansion next year is 3.85 trillion Korean won, all allocated for the procurement of 140 Vera Rubin NVL72 server racks. Each NVL72 rack is equipped with 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs, totaling 10,080 Rubin GPUs. This batch is independent of the 52,000 advanced GPUs announced by the ministry to be acquired by 2028, and the actual supply may be adjusted according to NVIDIA's delivery situation.The budget of 27.5 billion Korean won per rack is significantly higher than foreign media predictions. U.S. investment bank Bernstein's June report estimated the cost of a Vera Rubin NVL72 rack at 9.1 million dollars (approximately 12.3 billion Korean won), while Morgan Stanley estimated it at about 7.8 million dollars (approximately 10.5 billion Korean won). The government stated that the budget has taken into account potential price increases due to GPU shortages and the costs of supporting facilities. This batch of chips will be used for the development of next-generation cutting-edge models such as general artificial intelligence. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Lee Kyung-sook mentioned in June that creating a model on par with Anthropic's large model Mythos would require about 10,000 Vera Rubins, and this scale of 140 units is comparable.

Bilal Bin Saqib, the Minister of State for Pakistan and Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), revealed at the Bitcoin Asia conference that the country completed the establishment of its virtual asset regulatory system in less than six months, using only about 8% of the approved budget, which is approximately $200,000, with about 92% of the budget remaining unused. Saqib stated that the government should not measure success by how much money is spent, but rather by the actual delivery of results. The regulatory framework covers activities such as exchanges, custody, brokerage, asset management, lending, and settlement, and introduces requirements regarding governance, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, customer asset protection, cybersecurity, and market conduct. Saqib emphasized that Pakistan's regulatory ambitions extend beyond the current digital asset market, with future focus on the tokenization market, programmable payments, stablecoins, machine-to-machine transactions, and the AI agent economy, noting the need to establish corresponding regulatory rules for agent payments and the agent economy. Saqib stated that emerging markets do not need to spend a decade catching up; they can build on the frontier. With a population of over 240 million, Pakistan is a potentially significant market for emerging financial technologies. The rapid transition from legislation to licensing in the country is being used as a demonstration case for the government's response to next-generation financial infrastructure.

The State Council Information Office held a series of themed press conferences titled "Starting Off the 14th Five-Year Plan." Officials from the Ministry of Finance introduced the role of this year's proactive fiscal policy and outlined the key focus areas for policy efforts in the second half of the year.Vice Minister of Finance Liao Min stated that since the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Finance has firmly implemented a more proactive fiscal policy:This year's fiscal expenditure budget arrangement has exceeded 30 trillion yuan for the first time.The scale of new government bonds has reached 11.89 trillion yuan, the largest in history.Central government transfers to local governments have exceeded 10 trillion yuan for the fourth consecutive year, reaching 10.42 trillion yuan.In the second half of the year, fiscal policy will continue to focus on three areas for effective results: accelerating the use of funds, increasing efforts to expand domestic demand, and strengthening fiscal reform management.Regarding incremental policies, in the second half of the year, based on the macroeconomic operation situation, the Ministry of Finance will timely plan and introduce practical and effective incremental policies to provide strong support for achieving a qualitative improvement and reasonable growth in the economy.

According to CoinDesk, the decentralized lending protocol Compound Finance has completed a leadership adjustment and approved a record budget of $52 million. The total value locked in the protocol has decreased from a peak of $12 billion in 2021 to $1.2 billion, and it is seeking to restore growth.Compound Finance is shifting towards serving institutional clients, developing real-world asset products, partner integration solutions, and credit infrastructure to meet the compliance and technical standards of traditional finance.Industry executives stated that Compound Finance's new leadership team and large budget align with the overall shift in the decentralized finance sector towards serving financial institutions. The overall assets in this sector had previously decreased due to market weakness and security breach incidents.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced that the budget deficit for July was $432 billion, exceeding market expectations of $346 billion, compared to a budget deficit of $291 billion in the same period last year.

On August 11, TSMC held a board meeting and approved a capital budget of approximately $29.443 billion to expand advanced process and advanced packaging capacity to meet the strong demand brought by AI and high-performance computing. In May of this year, the board had already approved $31.283 billion, bringing the total approved capital budget for the year to $60.726 billion (approximately NT$1.96 trillion). TSMC Chairman C.C. Wei stated at the July earnings call that in the coming years, 13 advanced wafer fabs and advanced packaging plants will continue to be built in Taiwan, covering Kaohsiung, Hsinchu Baoshan, and Tainan, with the total investment scale in Arizona, USA also increasing to $26.5 billion.The board also approved the establishment of a joint venture with Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation, with TSMC's investment cap set at 282 billion yen. The joint venture will be located in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, aiming to mass-produce next-generation image sensors for smartphones by 2029. In addition, the board approved a cash dividend of NT$7 per share for the second quarter, with the ex-dividend date set for December 10. TSMC will provide eligible foreign shareholders with the option to receive cash dividends in US dollars.

According to Jinshi, senior officials at the U.S. Pentagon pitched the "Reconciliation 4" plan to Senate Republicans in a closed-door meeting, emphasizing the need for a significant increase in military funding to replenish weapon stockpiles depleted by the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine.Defense Secretary Hegseth and several deputy secretaries provided a detailed closed-door briefing to Republican members of key Senate committees, analyzing global threats and discussing the issue of U.S. military ammunition stockpiles.

According to a report by Reuters on July 13, the South Korean government announced plans to draft a budget expenditure for the fiscal year 2027, which will reach a historic high of over 800 trillion won (approximately 530.97 billion USD). The expansion of this budget scale is mainly attributed to strong tax revenue growth brought about by the prosperity of the AI chip industry.The South Korean government stated that the funding for the budget will rely on increased tax revenue and the restructuring of existing expenditure items amounting to about 50 trillion won. In terms of fund allocation, the three major "giant projects"—chips, AI data centers, and physical AI—will receive the highest financial priority.In addition, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung emphasized that this is a critical period for determining global AI dominance. To this end, South Korea plans to establish a "Future Response Fund" as a strategic investment platform, which will specifically invest excess tax revenue in four key areas: youth, growth engines, regional development, and talent cultivation, to ensure that corporate investments proceed as planned.

According to reports from Jiemian News, Kingsoft Cloud will accelerate the construction of GPU computing clusters in the second half of the year to meet the explosive growth in computing power demand from major clients. Among them, Xiaomi's demand for Kingsoft Cloud's GPU computing power has upgraded from a ten-thousand-card cluster, with the related budget significantly increasing from nearly 4 billion yuan to over 10 billion yuan. In addition, Alibaba's large model team has signed a 5-year computing power leasing contract with Kingsoft Cloud, involving more than 3,000 eight-card GPU servers. Based on the contracted price, the annualized revenue after full delivery will exceed 4 billion yuan.To meet the surging customer demand, Kingsoft Cloud's capital expenditure plan for 2026 has been raised to 15 billion yuan, with an annual revenue target of 12.5 billion to 13.5 billion yuan. It is reported that due to tight upstream supply, Kingsoft Cloud is currently only accepting long-term contracts from clients for 3 to 5 years, and some orders are facing delivery delays. Due to concerns about the risk of impairment of high-level card assets, Kingsoft Cloud is currently pausing aggressive hardware expansion, anticipating that the prices of computing hardware may reach a turning point for decline in the third quarter of this year.