Tag Archives: Deficits

The US Government Is On Track to Top Last Year’s Record-Breaking Deficits, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on May 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

The US government goes from new high to newer high in deficits. The chances it will ever repay its debt with dollars whose value is anything approaching the value of dollars today is infinitesimal. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

The Treasury department has issued its spending and revenue report for April 2021, and it’s clear the US government is headed toward another record-breaking year for deficits.

According to the report, the US federal government collected $439.2 billion in revenue during April 2021, which was a sizable improvement over April 2020 and over March 2021. Indeed, April 2021’s revenue total was the largest since July of last year when the federal government collected 563.5 billion following several months of delays on tax filing deadlines beyond the usual April 15 deadline. (Not surprisingly, in most years, April tends to be the federal government’s biggest month for tax collections.)

In spite of April’s haul, however, the federal government managed to spend much more than that, with spending topping $664 billion during April. This means the federal government ran a sizable deficit in April of 225.6 billion. This was a middling sum compared to other monthly deficits this fiscal year (which began on October 1), but deficits are adding up fast.

For the first seven months of this fiscal year combined, the US government collected $2.1 trillion in revenue, yet it spend nearly twice as much: $4.1 trillion, or 90 percent more than it collected.

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The Ugly Truth About Printing Press Money, by MN Gordon

Posted on April 17, 2021 | 1 comment

The monthly budget deficit in March of this year was $660 billion, which was the annual budget deficit in 2017. It takes a PhD in economics to believe a government can perpetually borrow and never go broke. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Weeping and gnashing of teeth shall come…

We don’t know when, exactly.  But we do know a certain catastrophe’s approaching.  In fact, we can see it on the horizon.

Does anyone in Washington give a rip the nation’s beyond broke?  Does anyone in Congress care that outright money printing is what’s financing their stimulus bills?  Does House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters think it’s all a real hoot?

Surely, someone in the legislature is aghast at federal spending that’s gone completely out of control.

Are you aghast?

We are.  But there’s nothing we can do to stop it.  Nearly all remnants of fiscal conservatism have been quarantined from federal government.

The majority of the electorate have voted for generous gifts from the public treasury.  They want free education, free food, free phones, free transportation, and free drugs.  They want debt forgiveness.  Most of all, they want free money.

Many representatives are pushing the President to give the voters what they want…and what the politicians have promised.  Specifically, more stimmy checks.  According to MoneyWise:

“More than 75 members of Congress say that until the pandemic is over, there should be regular stimulus checks.  President Joe Biden is being urged to wrap them into the $2.3 trillion infrastructure spending plan he’s now promoting.”

Stimmy checks, as far as we can tell, have nothing to do with infrastructure.  Yet that’s the beauty of perpetual stimmy checks in the interminable pandemic era.  The legislature can “wrap them into” just about anything.  All it takes is a simple stimmy check earmark.

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Posted in Banking, Collapse, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government

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Yields To Surge As Biden-Yellen Create Record Deficits, by Egon von Greyerz

Posted on March 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

The deficits over the last year and now projected into the next few years are going to push up interest rates. From Egon von Greyerz at goldswitzerland.com:

Well, right on cue, it looks like the endless creation of fake money by the Fed has now poisoned both the stock market and the bond market. The Dow was down 1,000 (3%) points in two days and the Nasdaq down 7% in two weeks.

Gold and silver are also falling in sympathy. This was expected short term, but the outlook for the precious metals look excellent as I will discuss later.

Is this what the 16th century Swiss doctor Paracelsus ordered? It certainly looks like it. He told us that too high a dosage of anything is toxic. And with a world flooded with toxic money with little value, the levels of poison have reached extremes.

The toxic financial system needs to be cleansed but as we have warned many times, this will have dire consequences for the world.

FRANTIC STOCK BUYING BEFORE THE MUSIC STOPS

Buy high and sell low is the mantra of many investors. And as the stock market surges – buy more! And when it falls, buy still more.

But this time, the method of always being long, which has been fool proof for decades and underwritten by the Fed, will fail hopelessly. Whether investors buy on strength or buy the dips, they will get slaughtered.

As often the case at the end of a cycle, we have in recent weeks seen frantic buying of anything that moves just like with tech stocks in 1999-2000.

Just look at the incredible 16 week inflow to stocks of $414 billion. This is 2X the 2018 peak of $200b and an all-time record.

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Biden’s Banana Republic, by Egon von Greyerz

Posted on January 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

The title is actually an insult to legitimate banana republics; America is way beyond that. Banana republics don’t have the world’s reserve currency to grease the skids on their chronic deficits and debts. From Egon von Greyerz at goldswitzerland.com:

Donald Trump is probably the luckiest presidential candidate in history to have lost an election. He doesn’t realise it yet as he suffers from a self-inflicted wound in the final moments of his presidency. Nor does Biden yet realise how unlucky he is to have won. But that will soon change as his presidency goes from crisis to crisis in all areas from monetary to fiscal to social and political. Very little will go right during his presidency.

The next four years could easily be four years of hell for Biden (if he stays the course for the whole four years), for the US and thus for the world.

TRUMP OBLIGED AS PREDICTED

When Trump won the election in November 2016 I wrote an article, dated Nov 18, 2016, called “Trump Will Grow US Debt Exponentially” .

The article also contained the following graph. In the article I predicted that US debt would double by 2025 to $40 trillion and that it would be $28t in January 2021 at the end of the four years.

Well, surprise, surprise, the debt is today $27.77t which can easily be rounded up to $28t.

I am certainly no forecasting genius, nor was the forecast just luck.

No, it was applying the best method that we have all been given but that few apply or understand.

This method is called HISTORY.

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Debt is the Real Pandemic, by Ron Paul

Posted on September 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

Long after coronavirus is but a memory, our children and grandchildren will be paying for it. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest “Update on the Budget Outlook,” this year’s $3.3 trillion federal deficit is not just three times larger than last year: it is the largest federal deficit in history. The CBO update also predicts that the federal debt will equal 104 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) next year and will reach 108 percent of GDP by 2030.

The CBO update also shows that the Social Security, Medicare, and highway trust funds will all be bankrupt by 2031. This will put pressure on Congress to bail out the trust funds thus further increasing the debt.

This year’s spike in federal spending was caused by the multi-trillion dollar coronavirus relief/economic stimulus bills passed by Congress and signed by the president. However, spending had already increased by $937 billion from the time President Trump was sworn in until the lockdown.

Federal spending is unlikely to be reduced no matter who wins the presidential election. Former Vice President Joe Biden has proposed increasing spending on everything from Obamacare to militarism to “green” cronyism. Yet some progressives are attacking Biden for being to “stingy” in his spending proposals. Even more distressing is how few progressives are critical of Biden’s support for increasing the military budget.

With some notable exceptions, such as his infrastructure plan, President Trump is not proposing any massive new spending programs. However, he Is not promising to stop increasing, much less cut, federal spending.

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Jobless Thursday – How the Donald Is Making America Poor Again, by David Stockman

Posted on July 25, 2020 | 4 comments

Make no mistake, America is getting massively poorer by the day. From David Stockman at lewrockwell.com:

Maybe it is time to don our tinfoil hat. Here’s the flat-out lie the WSJ reported this morning in response to the weekly unemployment claims release. It sure did make you think that the jobs picture is improving by the week:

The number of people receiving benefits through regular state programs, which cover the majority of workers, decreased by 1.1 million to 16.2 million for the week ended July 11. The decline extends the recent trend, with the number receiving benefits the lowest reading since the week ended April 11.

Just to make sure you grasped the good news, the WSJ added this chart for good measure:

Actually, there was no improvement at all this week!

And what remains is the greatest labor market disaster in history. As Wolf Richter observed in his excellent post on the heels of the DOL (Department of Labor) report:

If you read this morning or heard on the radio that 16.2 million people were claiming unemployment insurance – the “continued claims” – and you thought that there were only 16.2 million people who claimed unemployment benefits, you fell victim to lazy misreporting in the media, by reporters or bots that didn’t read the Labor Department’s press release beyond the second paragraph.

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Posted in Business, Debt, Economy, Government, Labor

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Republicans Are Now Good for Exactly…….. Nothing! By David Stockman

Posted on April 11, 2020 | 1 comment

Read through to the end of this article for the sickening list of “emergency relief” measures in the spending orgy coming out of Washington. From David Stockman at lewrockwell.com:

Nancy Pelosi, Chuckles Schumer and the rest of the Dem wrecking crew surely have the Trumpified GOP by the short hairs.

The latter are clueless about the real imperative, which is to halt the senseless shutdown of the US economy ASAP. So like deer caught in the headlights of public fear, outrage and hurt by the Covid Quarantines, they have blindly succumbed to bailing out one and all; and that, in turn, has opened the US Treasury to a congressional feeding frenzy that would make the New Deal porkers, the LBJ spenders and the Obama shovel-ready folks green with envy.

In less than a month, they have passed the $8.3 billion vaccine bill, the $100 billion relief and paid leave package and the $2.2 trillion Everything Bailout, and are now racing toward another $1.0 trillion interim CARES 2 funding bill to essentially double-down on all the outrageous pork and Free Stuff that was contained in CARES 1, which the House did not bother to even debate or approve by recorded vote.

And, alas, all of this is preliminary to the impending “stimulus/infrastructure” bill where the bidding starts at $2 trillion, meaning that the Imperial City is in the throes of a fiscal bacchanalia that defies imagination. It will leave America with unspeakable debts, political dysfunction and economic debilitation for years, if not decades, to come.

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Trump’s Budget: More Warfare, Slightly Less Welfare, by Ron Paul

Posted on February 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

Bipartisanship: the Democrats okay funds for the Republicans’ warfare state, the Republicans okay funds for the Democrats’ welfare state. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Listening to the howls from Democrats and the applause from Republicans, one would think President Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2021 budget is a radical assault on the welfare state. The truth is the budget contains some minor spending cuts, most of which are not even real cuts. Instead they are reductions in the “projected rate of growth.” This is equivalent of saying you are sticking to your diet because you ate five chocolate chip cookies when you wanted to eat ten.

President Trump’s plan reduces the Education Department’s budget by nearly eight percent, leaving the department with “only” 66.6 billion dollars. Cuts to other departments are similarly small, while reductions in entitlement spending consist mostly of reforms that will not affect most of those dependent on these programs.

President Trump deserves credit for proposing an 11.6 billion dollars cut in funding for the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Foreign aid does little to help impoverished people overseas. Instead, it benefits foreign government officials willing to do the US government’s bidding. The State Department and USAID are extensively involved in US intervention abroad, including efforts to overthrow governments.

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The Final Act, by Dmitry Orlov

Posted on December 19, 2019 | 2 comments

Is the repo crisis prelude to market rejection of US government debt at anything close to current interest rate levels such that the Federal Reserve will have to monetize an ever-increasing portion of that debt? Dmitry Orlov thinks so, and he could well be right. From Orlov at cluborlov.blogspot.com:

In processing the flow of information about the goings on in the US, it is impossible to get rid of a most unsettling sense of unreality—of a population trapped in a dark cave filled with little glowing screens, all displaying different images yet all broadcasting essentially the same message. That message is that everything is fine, same as ever, and can go on and on. But whatever it is that’s going on can’t go on forever, and therefore it won’t. More specifically, a certain coal mine canary has recently died, and I want to tell you about it.

It’s easy to see why that particular message is stuck on replay even as the situation changes irrevocably. As of 2019, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by four media conglomerates: Comcast (via NBCUniversal), Disney, ViacomCBS (controlled by National Amusements), and AT&T (via WarnerMedia). Together they have formed a corporate media monoculture designed to most effectively maximize shareholder value.

As I wrote in Reinventing Collapse in 2008, “…In a consumer society, anything that puts people off their shopping is dangerously disruptive, and all consumers sense this. Any expression of the truth about our lack of prospects for continued existence as a highly developed, prosperous industrial society is disruptive to the consumerist collective unconscious. There is a herd instinct to reject it, and therefore it fails, not through any overt action, but by failing to turn a profit because it is unpopular.”

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Posted in Business, Currencies, Debt, Financial markets, Money, Pensions, Politics

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Nothing Is Forever, Not Even Debt, by John Mauldin

Posted on November 26, 2019 | 1 comment

All the so-called economic growth we’re getting is debt-funded. From John Mauldin at interest.co.nz:

John Mauldin sees an ugly conflict coming soon to the US as their official debt levels become unsustainable and they face a “Great Reset”. Will a better wealth and policy balance rise from the impending shambles?

Nothing is forever, not even debt.

Every borrower eventually either repays what they owe, or defaults. Lenders may or may not have remedies. But one way or another, the debt goes away.

One of Western civilization’s largest problems is we’ve convinced ourselves debt can be permanent. We don’t use that specific word, of course, but it’s what we do and is why government debt keeps rising. We borrow faster than we repay previous borrowing—and I mean governments everywhere, China as well as the US.

Our leaders have no real plan to reduce the debt, much less eliminate it. They just want to spend, spend, spend forevermore. And most citizens are okay with that. As I will note below, the Republican Party I grew up with, which back then seemed to constantly talk about deficits and debt, is now comfortable with 5% (and growing) of GDP deficits.

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