This isn’t a game anymore.
Treasury Secretary Lew, a man who gives zero fucks, is warning Congress that they need to quit trying to provoke a government shutdown and to pass a funding bill ASAP. If you recall, the last time Congress did this, the market suffered. This go around, following a Fed meeting date on 10/28, the November 5th deadline is especially ominous.
“Over the past ten days, we have received quarterly corporate and individual tax receipts and additional information about the activities of certain large trust funds, including military retirement trust funds,” Lew wrote in his letter to Boehner. “The tax receipts were lower than we previously projected, and the trust fund investments were higher than projected- resulting in a net decrease of resources available to the United States government.”
Lew added, “Based on this new information, we now estimate that Treasury is likely to exhaust its extraordinary measures on or about Thursday, November 5. At that point, we would be left to fund the government with only the cash we have on hand, which we currently forecast to be below $30 billion. This amount would be far short of net expenditures on certain days, which can be as high as $60 billion. Moreover, given certain payments that are due in early to mid-November, we anticipate that our remaining cash would be depleted quickly.”
It’s also worth noting that Lew is pointing out that tax receipts are coming in less than expected. In other words, the economy is slowing.
I am sure the Fed will read this press release and counter it with a speech talking about the glamour and bubble-esque nature of this economy and how it desperately needs an emergency rate hike.
The closer we get to a funding crisis, the more volatile the markets will become.
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Could this not be a ruse to give stroke gnome the excuse to never raise rates? At least not in October. Possibly boolish.
doubt it.
There could be a boner play here too. Homeboy is quitting and all. Sounds possibly bad no doubt. Fucking DC is so polluted it is hard to tell.
The perfect opportunity to hike rates.
Jack Lew fondles cats
So Congress passed a chintzy CR (continuing resolution) that keeps us open until Dec. 11 when they have to go through all this again. What we need is a god damned budget that last longer than 10 weeks.
This isn’t about what most people in the country need.
Didn’t want to comment bc I await gloom doom and destruction
but possible hypeing for result? i assume hes not actually bluffing on the deficit. maybe subliminal threat?
maybe i should watch the zero fucks video
Indeed. Have we not been told before the treasury was out of money? And it was fucking horseshit. They just print it anyway. But that is not the point. This is political ass hammering. Dem vs Rep. Circus of power.
If the Treasury could never run out of money and could just print it to pay for anything they wanted, then there would be no point in Congress shutting the government down And this would not be happening at all.
Treasury cannot print money. The Fed does that.
Best post of the day.
I know everyone loves to shoot the messenger, but what if what Lew says is true?
The difficult thing about these situations is that we really don’t know– which is the case about much of what happens in Congress & in other branches of government. We really have no way of finding out the true story, or whether what we are told is so.