The US Daily Cash Surplus for 9/17/2013 was $3.0B as $9.4B of taxes “not withheld” were deposited in federal accounts Tuesday resulting in a rare Tuesday surplus. Still…revenues edged down about $1B from year ago…could be small timing issues, but we won’t know for a few more days. Remember this is the category that surged 40% YOY back in April and 16% in our last quarter end (June). With 9 full business days remaining, they are currently down 1%. It’s not time to panic…yet…we should continue to see strong inflows from this source for the rest of the month, but obviously this isn’t where we want to be with more than half of the month already in the books.
On outlays, I have a correction to make. Treasury issued a revised DTS for 9/3, with the net effect being a $14B decrease in outlays. It was issued a few weeks ago around the time I was on vacation, but I just glanced at it today and corrected my database…The revised numbers actually make a lot more sense. All month long, I’ve been seeing a ~+$40B of outlays, while timing was only explaining about $30B. So with the revision, we are at +28B, which indicates a small marginal reduction after adjusting for timing, consistent with what we would expect with sequestration ongoing. Yesterday I made some comments indicating that reaching the $70B surplus I had originally forecast was going to be a challenge…I’ll need to re-evaluate that in light of this $14B pickup, but I will probably wait for a few more days of data.
