Fiscal snapshot: April ends with $373 billion in spending. Not bad, but some dark clouds are gathering.

Okay, so here's the end of April fiscal snapshot. It's not great news. It's not a disaster (yet), but it's not great in my opinion.

For the month of April the Federal Government spent $373 billion. That surpassed last April by $3 billion. Year-over-year Federal spending is up by $91 billion. That's the good news. We're on track at this pace to hit, almost, $4.3 trillion in total top-line spending for the fiscal year. That would be the first real increase since 2009.

That's good.

Here's the problem: Spending is stalling. Just about a month ago we were $110 billion over last year. The pace of spending over FY 2014 is slowing. This is not surprising because since mid-March Treasury has been running under  the debt ceiling constraint. These idiots in Congress still have not done anything  on the debt ceiling or the budget and who knows what kinds of measures, if any, Lew is using to pay the bills and that may not be able to last forever.

Furthermore, both CBO and OMB were predicting closer to $200 billion in spending above last year. We're coming in nowhere near that. I'm sure the morons over at Fix the Debt are elated. Jerks.

Now for the bad news (if you listen to other MMT economists). The deficit through the fiscal year so far is a paltry $252 billion. That's only 1.4% of GDP. The freakin' budget is almost in balance. The White House should be popping champagne corks, but they're too stupid to realize and also too stupid to understand that this is unequivocally NOT a good thing. Morons as well.

The top-line stall in spending is worrisome, at least to  me. Without a concomitant increase in non-government indebtedness, then it could mean trouble for the economy/stocks. Furthermore, higher private sector debt accumulation is not anything to cheer about, except maybe if you're a banker. It's just that we can go a while before debt service levels reach the tipping point, like where they were in 2007.

All data from the Daily Treasury Statement, of course. Remember, I teach a course on this, so if you want to learn how to do all this analysis and be able to read that Daily Treasury Statement then sign up for my course. It's well worth it. There's one coming up this Saturday. It's online. If you want to enroll please go to the link below.

Daily Treasury Statement course, Saturday, May 9.