Hi and welcome to the November Monthly Macro. I was thinking that this has felt like a boring month, but then compiled too long of a list of things to talk about. At least we don’t have dull news.

First off - Zohran Mamdani is mayor of NYC. Will this change anything? While there was talk and promise of affordable housing and government supermarkets, will any socialist policies (if they happen) have a tangible effect on NYC tech/fintech businesses or startups? Will people and or money flow out of the city? Will businesses decide to build elsewhere? Will this leave the city worse off? So many questions, maybe we will have some answers.

It would be unusual for firms to change plans due to a change in mayor, but there has never been a DSA mayor in the capital of capitalism before.

Second - let’s take a quick trip back to Argentina.

Last month I wrote about the Argentina Debt Plan. The $20 billion bank-led debt facility is dead, as reported by the WSJ. Instead JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup will lend Argentina $5 billion through a short-term repurchase facility to provide dollars for an upcoming $4 billion debt payment in January. This is a bandaid not a solution, and makes clear that banks were not comfortable with the exposure and loose protections. This is also not a great sign for fintechs in FX, cross-border payments, or USD-linked accounts, all of which will remain volatile (for now).

Now for some longer stories

Government Shutdown Ends! (Yay)

The longest government shutdown in history ended. While this is good news, what will be the effects of a 43 day federal government shutdown?

Government workers are going to receive back pay, but government payroll processing is not super quick or clear, so when the back pay will come is a different question. 1.4 million federal government employees went without pay for 43 days - 670,000 furloughed employees and roughly 730,000 continuing to work without pay. This leads to an interesting question about who is the average US government worker - can they survive more than a month without a paycheck?

The end of the shutdown means that data is now being released, also yay! Data! The September Jobs report was released November 20th- it’s still unclear what will happen (if anything) with October data, but November reports will be released. The data challenge is two fold, not only was there a shutdown but the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not running at full capacity. While there is so much talk about data and concern with the lack of it, it is a macro issue. Without a high level picture of where the economy is at, we are operating in the dark. Since we must always talk about rate cuts in 2025, the lack of data meant the Federal Reserve had to rely on partial information, which could have affected monetary policy modeling and rate decisions.

Fintechs and banks were also affected. Mortgage lenders, SBA loan programs, and credit risk models all depend on up to date federal data. This can cause some problems but overall it seems like the impact has been really minimal. But the biggest effect is on individual families who had to survive 43 days without a paycheck. What does the financial resilience of middle class US households say about the economy? And what does the seeming lack of long term resilience mean for fintechs? The weak resilience ties back into fintech in many spaces - credit underwriting, BNPL repayment rates, demand for earned wage access, the volatility of payment flows, and even how regulators should think about consumer protection. However most pertinent to think about are consumer finance fintechs, which are built on the assumption that households have solid short term financial resilience. This shutdown showed that this assumption may be a big one, so will fintechs need to rethink how they structure, do business, and support customers?