US budget deficit hits record high for November on interest costs
US budget deficit hits record high for November on interest costs
The U.S. federal budget deficit jumped 26% in November from a year earlier to $314 billion, a record for the month and the highest since March, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday, driven by sharply higher interest costs and other outlays.
Federal revenues in November rose $23 billion to $275 billion, a 9% increase from a year earlier.
Outlays jumped $88 billion to $589 billion, 18% higher than a year earlier. Interest payments on U.S. government debt accounted for $25 billion of the increase.
The outlay for interest on the debt in November, at
$80 billion, surpassed the$66 billionoutlay for national defense, which was up $8 billion from a year earlier. The outlay for the government-run Medicare health insurance program also rose by $8 billion, to$93 billion, while the outlay for the government-run Medicaid program for the poor and disabled climbed $2 billion to$50 billion.
TFW your interest payments approach medicare spending
The weighted average interest rate on the $26 trillion of outstanding Treasury securities rose to 3.10% last month from 2.22% in November of last year.
Seems nice in 
sense, if fed won't drop interest rates in the next year, libertarian bugbear about deficits will come closer to fruition
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There is nothing wrong with high budget deficit (neoliberal austerity myth needs to die). In fact, it’s the trickling down of the high interest payments that has been keeping the US economy from going into recession over the past 1.5 years.
Remember when all the right wing economists predicted a recession and hard landing? Lol this just shows you how completely out of touch the neoclassical economics is with reality.
The real problem is that the high interest rate is disproportionately enriching the wealthy (the top 1%) while burdening lower classes (who are struck with higher interests for their debt payment). This is how the wealth flows from the bottom 99% to the top 1%.
The US economy is now in a quandary. I have been saying for a long time that as long as the interest rates is high, there will be no recession in the US. BUT, when it starts lowering the interest rates, that’s when recession will come.
Fundamentally its sucking parked money from stock market and overseas into t-bills (why would you buy p/e 25 stock, when treasuries have p/e 20), but for that you need free money. They have not managed to suck stock market money, they've managed to suck overseas money though, usa stock market continues to ignore everything and hope for relief.
But free money are not limitless in the world, and the longer this goes the less buyers they will find
Like 1 or 2 trillion is fine, 5 trillion a year would be unbearable for the world i thinkThe US literally doubled the amount of dollars during Covid to keep the economy afloat, and the same during Obama’s years to bail out the failing banks:
Free money is indeed limited to the extent of the availability of labor, resources and technology. The problem is how those money were spent (mostly goes to the rich people instead of investing in public infrastructures and the real sector), not how much they were spent.
Yes, but also willingness of overseas banks to buy t-bills. If usa were not empire, internal market for treasuries is huge but not limitless - on par with total stock market and bond market of round 100 trillion.
If buyers suddenly can't absorb new treasury bills, for lib economics that's a huge problem. Yes, fed can accumulate them on their spreadsheet for a while, until people outside of the usa think its fine. Than, if they change their minds it will suddenly be very not fine
As a corollary, these rates must make dollar conversion attractive, which inflates the dollar, which makes investment in export goods even less attractive and worsens our trade imbalance.
Ancaps unironically think that this will be solved by having porky directly replace the government in its entirety and that porky will not just continue this shit.
If crypto has shown us anything it’s that porkies will centralize exchanges at their earliest convenience. Same goes for various levers of state power.
they've managed to suck overseas money
That’s interesting. Capital control now plz.