The US Daily Cash Deficit for Thursday 2/5/2015 was $5.0B bringing the February 2015 deficit to $30B through 5 days.
Refunds for 2015 stand at $15.5B vs $11.8B last year, so the gap has been closed considerably as expected. The pace of refunds should pick up next week….2014 posted $58B of refunds in the second week of February. I was flipping through last February’s posts and it jogged my memory about the brief debt ceiling fight about this time last year that ended up with a clean debt limit hike through March 2015. There was a week or two where Treasury was using “extrordinary measures” to circumvent the limit. When they do that, it screws up the cash deficit calculations, because they essentially take debt off the balance sheet and pretend like it doesn’t exist. Since EM started and were resolved in the same period it didn’t cause any issues for the monthly cash deficit calculation, but it did end up screwing up a lot of the day to day. The other day I noted that the month would be a pretty clean YOY comparison since we started on the same day and had the same number of business days. Turns out….that’s not going to be the case until about 2/19 when all of the EM was unwound last year. Until then, our outlays and deficit are going to be out of sync…especially next week. Revenues should be still in sync though, so sit back and enjoy the show.
