The US Daily Deficit for 1/3/2013 was $23.9B bringing the monthly total through 3 days to $27B, pretty much in line with last year. The 1/3 DTS does reveal one slightly interesting fact you probably will not get on the news…we are no longer officially at the debt limit. Usually, what they do is get the debt within $25M of the limit, and keep it there until the limit is inevitably raised. But after 2 days at the limit, the debt was reduced today, down to 16.3925, $1.525B under the limit. Hmmmm… Not sure what that’s about, but in any case, the debt limit cushion is a mere $64B…mostly cash. I had been pushing out the debt limit critical date into later Feb or even early March, but it is starting to look like I had underestimated how much Intragovernmental debt would increase. I still can’t accurately model “extrordinary measures” and I still have not seen anything on whether or not tax refunds will be delayed, so it’s hard to narrow down the range, but using last year as a straight line, a 64B cushion only gets us to February 3. On the other hand, I keep hearing about extrordinary measures giving them $200B of headroom, but that sound high to me. Using the same methodology, an additional $200B gets us to the end of Feb…keep in mind that last year Feb ran a $249B deficit, and refunds were not delayed. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what kind of tricks Geithner has left, and what kind of fight the Republicans plan on putting up.
