Last October, the Federal Reserve relaunched quantitative easing. Of course, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell insists it’s not quantitative easing. But as Peter Schiff pointed out in a recent tweet, that debate is really just semantics.
The argument over whether the current Fed balance sheet expansion constitutes QE is pointless. QE was always just a euphemism for debt monetization. The Fed monetized debt in the past, its monetizing more debt in the present, and it will monetize even more debt in the future!”
The CBO projects the federal government will run massive budget deficits into the foreseeable future and says the ballooning national debt poses “significant risk” to the economy and financial system.
According to the CBO, the federal budget shortfall will hit $1.02 trillion in FY 2020 and rise into the foreseeable future. Deficits will average $1.3 trillion per year between 2021 and 2030 and top $1.5 trillion by the end of the decade. The CBO projects cumulative deficits over the next decade to total $13.1 trillion.
The US federal government ran a budget deficit of over $1 trillion in the 2019 calendar year. It was the first budget deficit over $1 trillion in any calendar year since 2012 — in the midst of the Great Recession.
The budget shortfall from January through December totaled $1.02 trillion, according to the latest report issued by the Treasury Department. That continued a rapidly accelerating upward trajectory. The 2019 budget gap was 17.1% bigger than the 2018 deficit, which was a 28.2% increase over 2017.
Fiscal 2020 started just like fiscal 2019 ended – with a massive federal budget deficit. And that has Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell worried. In an ironic bit of political theater, Powell lectured Congress about the spending he helps facilitate.
The budget shortfall last month was 34% higher than the October 2018 deficit, coming in at $134.5 billion, according to the latest Treasury Department report. That starts fiscal 2020 off on track to eclipse a $1 trillion deficit.
Uncle Sam is spending money far faster than he’s taking in. The US federal government ran the biggest budget deficit in seven years in fiscal 2019, according to the Treasury Department. And the spending is even worse than advertised.
The $984 billion deficit amounts to 4.7 percent of GDP. That’s the highest percentage since 2012. It was the fourth consecutive year in which the deficit increased as a percentage of GDP. The debt-to-GDP ratio is estimated to have increased a hefty 26 percent over last year.
When is a $984 billion budget deficit good news?
When you thought you might get a $1 trillion budget deficit.
The Treasury Department released the fiscal year 2019 budget numbers on Friday. The budget shortfall came in at $984 billion right on the CBO estimate. A CNBC report said this would likely, “come as a relief to the Trump administration, which had previously forecast that the deficit would hit $1 trillion during the 2019 fiscal year.”
The US national debt increased by a staggering $814 billion between Aug. 1 and Oct. 6, according to Treasury Department data.
That represents a 4% increase in the debt — in just a little over two months.
The budget deficit for fiscal year 2019 came in just a hair under $1 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office estimate.
Even if it does come in under the trillion-dollar mark, it would still rank as biggest deficit since 2012. The budget shortfall has only eclipsed $1 trillion four times, all during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Everybody is talking about the possibility of a trade deal.
Well, maybe not everybody. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap, host Mike Maharrey rehashes his standard trade war observations and then moves on to bigger news – Jerome Powell’s announcement that the Fed is resuming QE. Of course, Powell didn’t exactly say that. In fact, he tried to say the opposite in a statement that Mike describes as “word salad.” In this episode, Mike breaks down what’s going on with the Fed and why it matters a lot more than the possibility of a trade deal. He also covers some important gold-specific news that came out this week.
The US national debt increased by $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2019, which ended Sept. 30. This follows on the heels of a $1.27 trillion increase in the national debt in fiscal 2018.
