The US Daily Cash Deficit for Thursday 4/30/2015 was $1B bringing the April 2015 full month Surplus to $178B topping both last April’s $125B surplus and my forecast of $155B by a healthy margin. For a better month, you have to go back to April of 2008….yes that 2008…. at $$188B Surplus, which was the best month ever in my data set going back to 1999.
Without a doubt Revenue stole the show posting a +$57B gain YOY, good for +13%. Not too shabby given current GDP growth. Outlays were up $5B, with higher SS/Medicare/Medicaid spending being partially offset by decreases in payments to “Defense Vendors”, “Education”, and “Other”.
For the YTD 1/3 of the way in, Revenues are up 10% and outlays are up 4%, which pencils out to a $62B YOY improvement down to $85B. We are still on track to hit ~$400B deficit for the full year, including $110B in May alone. Of course, that’s on the current trajectory, which could change course at any time.
Cash in hand….just $35B at the end of February has soared to $274B as Treasury has opted to keep debt at the limit rather than pay anything down with their cash hoard. We are now a month and a half into “Extraordinary Measures” (EM) , and back of the envelope I would guess they have burned through about $100B of ~$350B of this accounting magic trick. So $250B of EM, and $274B of cash in hand gives us $525B of cushion before the vault is empty. This gets us all the way to next February’s tax refund season, and the primaries for the 2016 presidential race. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but I’m guessing it will get some press coverage, so mark your calendar:)
Put it all together, and it was a really good month. The key here will be to see how May and June follow this up. Remember that a good chunk of the taxes paid in April were related to last year, so April isn’t always a good indicator of the current trend.
