The US daily Cash Deficit for Friday 10/25/2013 was $4.9B pushing the October 2013 cash deficit to $79B with 4 business days remaining.
Revenues actually lost a bit of ground…in part due to strong tax refunds which were delayed earlier in the month during the shut down. My initial estimate for the month was $91B. We are already close to that….but honestly, there is a lot of uncertainty about the remaining 4 days, so I hesitate to even try to guess where it ends up.
The US Daily Cash Deficit for 10/24/2013 was $8.4B pushing the October 2013 cash deficit through 25 days to $75B.
Same old story…Revenue continues to make small daily gains…Outlays…not so much. Oh well…I guess we’ll find out how the story ends next Friday.
The US Daily Cash deficit for 10/23/2013 was $11.6B as the final SS checks of the month went out totaling $12.3B. This brings the October 2013 deficit through 23 days to $66B. We did see a small trickle of those delayed payments start going out today starting with 2.6B of tax refunds and $0.5B for the Commodity Credit Corporation….whatever the heck that is.
Revenues continue to make small gains vs. 2012 and are now at +$12B. If they continue at this pace, hitting +10% seems likely, which will be good for a symbolic win if nothing else. For the rest of the month, I’ll be keeping my eyes on revenues.
Perhaps of note…though it’s not set in stone, the vast majority of SS payments have gone out, and for the second month in a row it is looking like outlays were pretty much flat. August ended up at $61.632B…October is sitting at $61.671B…only $39M higher. For reference, in a typical month, we’ve been seeing about +$300M, with some seasonal variation. Quick math tells us that +100k people at $1163 per month would add about $125M to the baseline. Very interesting…. I have SS projected to grow at about 5% per year due to COLA increases and increased enrollment at higher monthly benefits. If we see a few more months like this, I may have to think about adjusting my forecast down a bit even though I had expected this to be a bit conservative. Oh well…when the facts change…so must the forecast….fingers crossed!! For what it’s worth…last October was at $56.949B…8.3% lower, so these last 3 months might just be an aberration. COLA increases go out in December, which should be good for a $1B bump at least, so one way or another, this won’t last more than another month or two.
The US Daily Cash Deficit for 10/22/2013 was $1.6B. Revenues continue to gain ground on 2012 and while they aren’t exactly popping…outlays are starting to come back up as expected with the shutdown over…including $37M of individual tax refunds…the first to go out in about 2 weeks. On the month, refunds look to be down 7.5B over 10/2012…good for the cash deficit…not so good if you happen to be waiting on a tax refund.
There are seven business days left, and the October deficit currently stands at $55B. My original projection for the month was $91B…assuming that the shutdown either wouldn’t happen or would be brief and it’s affects contained in the calendar month. Well the shutdown did happen, and while it is possible all of the back payments are made up by next Thursday, I haven’t seen much evidence yet that it is happening. So while $91B is still possible, we may end up better than $91B if revenues continue to gain ground and our missing outlays don’t materialize in October.
The US Daily Cash Surplus for Monday 10/21/2013 was $5.4B bringing the October 2013 cash deficit to $53B with 8 business days remaining in the month.
Revenues continue to gain at about $1B per day…now at +8B for the month. Outlays have yet to recover from the shutdown, which I suppose is understandable. The government has only been reopened for 3 business days….I know if I ever got a 2+ week vacation, it would take me a while to catch back up. Still….no sign of a pickup yet….I’ll keep looking. Tax refunds are another category that is down. No individual tax refunds have gone out since $25M on 10/8 almost 2 weeks ago. The result is that YOY, we are down $3B in that category all else equal.
All this adds up to an apparent $40B improvement, which would certainly be a good number…if it can hold up. As I’ve said before, it looks like at least ~$20B of outlays went unpaid during the shutdown, including salaries. With back pay being part of the agreement, I would expect us to catch back up to most of that, but I simply haven’t seen it yet.