Sorry for the delay on this one…It took a lot longer to get through the editing process at Seeking Alpha than I expected. Here’s the link.
It’s worth the trouble to get these published at SA first because it it pushes the article, and this site out to a far wider audience that it would get here alone. Also, I get paid per page view, which let’s be honest, isn’t much, but I won’t be sending it back. So click on over and tell all your friends about it!!
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.
Happy New Year!! The US Daily Deficit for 1/2/2013 was $3.1B. I’m not going to put up any charts and it’s too early in the month to really predict anything, so let’s take a look back at January 2012. A year ago, the deficit was $53B on 256B of revenue and $309B in outlays. It seems likely that we will see improvement over last January. We are coming off a pretty strong revenue month in 12/2012 which could carry over. There are some smaller timing issues related to outlays that should help a little bit, and finally, with the expiration of the payroll tax cut and the increasing of rates for the “wealthy”, we should start seeing revenues running $15-20B higher…on top of what we were seeing. On the other hand, social security recipients get a 1.7% raise this month…good for around another $1B per month…plus the 10k people who retire every day. I shouldn’t even throw a number out but what the heck. I’ll throw my dart at a $10B deficit for this month. Last month, my initial prediction was $30B deficit and we ended up with a $21B surplus….let’s see how this month ends up.
Swing and a Miss!! The US Daily Deficit for 12/31/2012 was $1.4B, substantially lower than my projection if $15-25B, leaving December’s surplus solidly intact at $20.6B vs December 2011’s $59.3B deficit. I’ll have more analysis later, but Revenue was up $45B and Outlays were down $35B resulting in an $80B improvement. No too shabby, if it it sticks. I’m hoping to get a 2012 total year piece posted in the next few days, and after that maybe a more in depth review of December and a look at January. So many things to do, so little time.
