The US Daily Cash Deficit for 10/3/2013 was $28B on typically weak Thursday revenues and $24B of social security payments.
After starting in a $10B hole, revenue has made some progress, narrowing the gap to $8B….we need to get to about +$20B by month end to show 10% growth. Still plenty of time, and we’ve been seeing stronger revenues in the second half of the month over prior years for some reason. Outlays are down, primarily from timing, but also about $3B so far of bona fide reductions. Don’t blame (or credit) that on the shutdown though…those paychecks wouldn’t even go out for a week or two anyway. 800k workers at $75k per year pencils out to $60B per year, $5B per month, and about $250M per day of savings…or lost wages… It’s not chump change, but it’s hardly material.
Cash was down $33B from $57B 10/2 to $24B 10/3. Looking at the rest of the month, there really aren’t any large inflows or outflows left on the calendar other than the next 3 social security payments and a ~$7B or so of corporate tax revenues around the 15th. Other than that, I’d just expect moderate deficits and surpluses most days as we slowly march up to ~$90B or so. Also looking at the calendar…I noticed that 11/3, when the first ~$25B social security payment of November is due is a Sunday, which means it will go out Friday 11/1 instead. This makes it likely that 11/1 is a pretty solid guess for the absolute latest the debt limit deal must be reached. It could obviously still happen before then, but making it past 11/1 and those $60B or so of outflows looks unlikely unless treasury has more “EM” magic left than they have been letting on.
**So much for government shutdown savings….I just read that an agreement has been reached to pay people to not work….seriously…this is the only damn thing they can agree on…to pay people not to work!! So we shut down the government, the monuments ect, take people’s blackberries and order them not to work…..then agree to pay them to not work. Sounds to me like being a “nonessential” government worker is turning out to be a pretty sweet gig. Is it really a surprise to anyone we can’t get our fiscal house in order?
