The US Daily Surplus for 1/22/2013 was $10B, pulling down the January Deficit through 22 days to $30B. The year on year numbers are still pretty close to 2012, keeping in mind that 2013 is currently 2 business days ahead of 2012. The remainer of the month should be pretty straight forward…I can’t remember what I predicted last time, but $25B looks like a reasonable estimate assuming marginal cost and revenue improvement over 2012 coupled with a slight delay in tax refunds.
The US Daily Deficit for 1/18/2013 was $0.3B. Usually, I do the month to date through the current day, but since we know that 1/19-1/21 were zero, I’m just going to say the January deficit through 21 days was $40B vs $43B in 2012…so virtually the same. Revenue is flat, outlays are flat..deficit is flat. There are 8 business days left…still plenty of time for 2013 to make a run, but through 3 weeks, there is no evidence of increased revenues due to the expiration of the payroll tax cut and the tak hike on high earners. I would expect some delay…especially on the income tax hike…but honestly, those hikes were so tiny, perhaps $15B per month…they could easily get lost in the noise, especially in what promises to be a chaotic 1Q.
Played around with it for 30 minutes yesterday and absolutely hate it…but….willing to give it a chance. I only need a few things from a computer. First, it has to be able to browse the intertubes, and second, it has to be able to handle some pretty huge excel files, as well as access and even a little sql. Fortunately, none of these are particularly demanding…Just about any windows 7 computer with 4GB or memory can handle everything I do, though 6 or 8GB would be better. Windows 7 handles all of that quite well, so whatever fancy new tricks windows 8 has will likely be wasted on me.
I did get office 2010 installed, but then couldn’t figure out how to open it without the start button. So I found an excel file and double clicked on it…which launched excel. Excel seems to run and look normal…check!!
Then I gave up for the day. I’m willing to keep trying because a few years back when I upgraded from office 2003 to 2007, I absolutely hated it for about a month. After that, I pretty much figured it out. A few months later, I switched to another job at a company still on 2003…and only then did I realize how great 2007 was. So, I’ll keep trying, and I’m sure I’ll figure out how to do everything I need to do, but honestly I don’t really expect it to actually be any better, just different. I see this as Microsoft’s attempt to “be cool” Maybe that’s what they need to do to stay competitive and profitable, but as a business user of my PC, I could care less about being cool, I just need a computer and OS that can handle my pretty basic needs without too much hassle.
There is no Daily Treasury Statement today due to the holiday/inauguration. Instead, I decided to take a look at some daily trends. First off, one thing you immediately notice is that Mondays are typically the strongest days for revenues, which makes sense. They (Treasury Employees) come in Monday morning, and process all those checks, wire transfers ect. that came in over the weekend, plus Monday activity, so it is like 3 days in one, except that weekend activity is obviously lighter. Of course, even flows would be 20% each, but we clearly see Monday on top at 30%, with Wednesday and Friday at ~20%, trailed by Tuesday and Thursday.
Outlays on the other hand are dominated by Wednesdays, which is when most of Social Security payments go out, with the rest going out on the third…whatever day that happens to be. The difference, of course gives us our deficit. In 2012, we actually ran a surplus…. but only on Mondays. Nearly $500B of deficit was incurred on Wednesdays due to heavy outlays, with Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday all around $200-$300B.
