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Working Paper
The 2025 U.S. Debt Limit Through the Lens of Financial Markets
We examine the 2025 U.S. debt limit episode through the lens of financial markets. First, we document an increase in trading activity in the U.S. sovereign CDS market, and we infer a probability of default from CDS premiums. We find that default risk reached 1% by the November 6 Presidential election, fell quickly after that, and progressively climbed back up in subsequent months to the current 1.1% level. Overall, these estimates are well below the default risk estimates for the debt-limit episodes of 2011, 2013, and 2023, which range from 4% to 6%. Second, so far we only find small ...