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On February 28, 2001 George Bush said this about his 2002 Budget: “It will retire nearly $1 trillion in debt over the next four years.” Instead, US debt, which at that point was $5.7 trillion, rose to $7.7 trillion. $3 trillion rounding error?
The dream? Economic recovery followed by the return of prosperity, built on borrowed money. And not just some borrowed money, but trillions and trillions of borrowed money.
New York Daily News reports, “The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted for massive spending cuts Saturday, slashing $60 billion from the budget and setting up a potential showdown with President Obama.” This Congress is under pressure
First in muni land, he expects massive carnage, and is already setting up a fund to buy closed-end muni funds in the next year when they crash to 40% of their net asset values. What makes the muni market so crisis proone is the nature of investors...
Barring some sort of deus ex machina, it seems certain that a government shutdown is coming in just two weeks (March 4, when the existing temporary funding bill runs out).
Illinois and Nevada have the most serious immediate problems, but this doesn't means states like California are out of the woods. Many states will develop the same kinds of problems, as Illinois and Nevada, over time.
So the Federal Reserve will have to continue monetizing the Federal government debt, with no end in sight—it really has no choice: If it doesn’t, interest rates will rise so high so fast, that the Federal government would simply go broke.
The House passed an amendment Thursday that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from using any funding to implement the network-neutrality order it approved in December.
In 1998 the TOTAL SPENDING of the Federal government was $1.65 trillion. We now run deficits that equal the entire budget of the United States in 1998, without blinking an eye or questioning how we got here. The politicians have scared the populace..
State and local government debt has reached at an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP, and many state and local governments are teetering on the brink of insolvency.
I don't pay too much attention to Presidential budgets. The general rule is that spending will be greater than forecast and that deficits will also grow beyond forecast. However, Keith Hennessy has done a great job of graphing the President's budget.
Cash-strapped US states and cities face the prospect of downgrades after Fitch Ratings changed the way it analyses their burgeoning pension bills.
Introduction – We rarely ever send out a special alert. This is a time when it is necessary. The reason is the US Dollar is in the process of no longer being accepted as a reserve currency. The value of the dollar will then decline and this will resu
“The key questions are whether states and local governments are funding their pensions, how much it is taking up of their general fund and concern about the crowding out of spending for other needs,” said Laura Porter at Fitch.
The new US budget was revealed by President Obama calling for America to rebalance the global economy, stressing that the US cannot rely on foreign governments to finance domestic consumption.
It doesn't surprise Kyle Bass that stocks are doing well despite the high debt rates because... Zimbabwe! Okay, we're not technically hyperinflating, but Bernanke is printing a lot of money.
Doug Ross (a real person and not George Clooney’s “ER” character) posted these charts to help us understand.
Bond fund giant Pacific Investment Management Co. slashed the U.S. government-related holdings in its flagship bond fund in January to multi-year lows.
US lawmakers have expressed opposition to the idea of allowing US states to seek bankruptcy protection to alleviate pension underfunding and other debt burdens.
This doesn't sound good. Illinois, which is probably the most stressed-out state financially, is postponing a bond sale that was scheduled for Thursday to next week.
The only thing one needs to know about Obama's latest budget is that projected revenues are expected to grow from $2.2 trillion in 2011 to $3 trillion in 2013 (and $3.6 trillion in 2015). We wonder just where the tax increases will come from...
The budget is about $3.7 trillion. Of that we take in about $2 trillion in taxes. The rest is being borrowed at present. There's no way we can possibly put more than 20% of federal revenue toward interest, and this presumes a 3% interest rate on...
So in other words, in less than six months, the FY 2011 budget—which has still yet to pass, scheduled for a vote this coming March 4—has had a deficit which has risen 23%.
If public debt is unsustainable and the burden on government budgets is too great, what does this mean for government bonds? The inescapable conclusion is that government bonds currently are a Ponzi scheme.
China's foreign exchange regulator has refuted media reports that the country may lose up to $ 450 billion by holding bonds of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US mortgage giants, which according to speculation may be phased out by the US government.
You can’t solve today’s problem of overconsumption and debt with more overconsumption and debt. The conditions that pulled America out of the Great Depression underscore that point. Once savings rates increased and made capital available...
We are watching one of the last great bubbles begin to deflate – the bubble of government and government debt – all over the developed world. This is a serious weight that will be a drag on our growth, and it is interesting to contemplate...
It is not Whitney’s fault that municipalities from one end of the country to the other have underfunded their pension plans, or that they have made costly promises, mostly but not exclusively to unions, that they are unlikely to be able to keep.
The state's uncertain budget outlook has prompted Moody's Investor Service to downgrade Arizona's debt outlook to "negative" from "stable."
Banking analyst Meredith Whitney's controversial call expecting a wave of municipal bond defaults has won her at least one prominent supporter—hedge fund manager Jim Chanos.
