Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

McClatchy: Fed Interest Earnings Approach $100 Billion

Fed’s interest earnings approach $100b WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve said Friday it transferred a record $96.9 billion to the U.S. treasury in 2014, profits on its unprecedented $4.4 trillion in holdings designed to support the U.S. economy in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Returning to a topic I have raised a few times […]

How the Fed Cornered the Long Bond

Fed Treasury Holdings 5-7-2014 The above link should take you to a PDF showing the Fed’s System Open Market Accounts holdings of Treasury Bonds and Notes which the second link will tell you comprise $2.224 trillion of the total $4.017 trillion of SOMA Holdings, with that total including $1.631 trillion of Fannie and Freddie Mac […]

Deficits, Debt, Debt Subject to the Limit, Off Budget, Trust Fund: Building your 2013 Toolkit

All of the terms in the post title have at least two usages, some of which map upon to common sense ideas from business or household budgeting, some not. Unfortunately the usages that don’t tend to be those used in federal budget reporting, and the result is untold confusion. Now one way out would be […]

Social Security & the Debt Limit

{Crossposted from dKos Social Security Defenders Group} Social Security has been off the radar this week for obvious reasons, progressives being more focused on efforts of Republicans to win the War on Women via the Continuing Resolution. Plus while Paul Ryan’s original Roadmap proposed privatization of Social Security his Budget proposal for next year left […]

Debt Limit Bill and Social Security Benefit Cuts

(cross posted at SocialSecurityDefender.blogspot.com) Well the first line of attack is opening up. Lindsay Graham is threatening to hold up the Debt Limit Increase Bill, and so potentially throw this whole country and perhaps the world into default unless he gets cuts to Social Security. This is insane on several levels, not least because the […]

"Run Government Like a Business" = Deficit Spending

We’re used to that line by now. Ross Perot—one of the more prominent people who got rich due to government contracts—used it, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are using it (while desperately hoping you don’t pay attention to how they ran Lucent/HP or eBay), and Aaron Sorkin even had Charles Grodin say it in Dave, […]

The answer is the domestic private sector

Jim Hamilton used the Federal Reserve Flow of Funds data to present a question: who will buy “the additional $8 trillion in net new debt that would be issued over the next decade under the CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario.” I thought that the analysis was curious and too “partial”. If one believes the deleveraging story, […]