Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Deadbeat Government Sector has not Paid it's Bill Since January 4th
The US Government has been operating at it's so-called "debt" ceiling of $15,193,975M since January 4th of this month.
Here is a link to the Daily Treasury Statement of that date, and here is a link to the DTS as of yesterday. You can see in Table III-C that the "Total Public Debt Outstanding" has not budged since January 4th. This number has been stuck at $15,236B since January 4th.
Since the government sector credits bank accounts of the non-government sector in order to provision itself, these transactions result in an exchange consisting of the transfer of real goods and services from the non-government sector to the government sector and a corresponding transfer of US dollar balances from the government sector to the non-government sector.
Typically, the Treasury will issue US Treasury securities in advance of paying for it's provision in order to obtain positive balances in it's Federal Reserve Account from which it can then disburse US dollar balances to the non-government sector in exchange for real goods and services. Since January 4th, you can see from the links to the Daily Statements above that no net additions to the stock of these securities have been added, which means that the government sector has only been able to "spend" what it has received in taxes since January 4th.
So the government sector has taxed away from the non-government sector ALL of the US dollar balances it has disbursed since January 4th.
What does that leave the non-government sector that has been provisioning the government sector with real goods and services since January 4th?
NOTHING.
The government sector has not paid any of it's bill from the non-government sector in 3 weeks now. Deadbeats? How else is one to look at this?
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4 comments:
It's gonna be interesting to see if we got a huge bulge in bank loans in that time. In the first 11 days of the month, loans were up $16 bln.
I would think so Mike.
I dont see how the non-govt can continue to operate (make payrolls, pay vendors, etc..) without either going to the bank for a loan or perhaps adjusting their own non-govt sector "liquidity preferences" by selling bonds to obtain USD balances to be able to pay their own non-govt sector bills.
In any case this is supposed to end tomorrow the 27th as that is supposed to be when the "debt" ceiling is raised by $1.2T.
Resp,
And during this time, who is the one entity that has virtually unlimited balances to buy Treasuries?
The Fed.
And they are buying Treasuries to replace the MBS as they roll off, and adjusting their maturities in the Fed portfolio.
The Fed NEVER hits the offer price when it buys USTs. The Fed continuously lowers it's bids to "get a good price for the taxpayers". There can be no other buyers over the last 3 weeks as there are net no new balances in the non-govt sector.
Hence a UST price reduction.
The monopolist at work, setting lower prices.
Resp,
They're so confused!! State a low-interest policy goal, then create a rate increase because of operational stupidity.
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