U.S.A. fact of the day

The US federal budget is haemorrhaging money. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office calculates that in the first seven months of the 2023 fiscal year, underlying government revenues are down 10 per cent with spending up 12 per cent. This leaves the federal budget deficit more than three times larger than in the same months of the 2022 fiscal year.

Weak receipts reflected lower realised capital gains than the CBO expected in late 2022, the transformation of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing programme from a cash cow to a significant burden and the possibility that the underlying recovery was not quite as healthy as initial statistics showed. Expenditure has risen sharply in almost all large federal budget areas.

Here is more from Chris Giles at the FT.