By Wolf Richter, includes “On Wednesday, the Treasury Department released its Monthly Treasury Statement for September and the fiscal year 2014. It’s the official account of how the US government arrives at its infamous deficit. And it was a doozie. Without giving it a second thought, the media gushed about the headline number, how good it looked, how the US government was getting its fiscal mess in order. Receipts rose $247 billion to $3,021 billion, outlays rose $50 billion to $3,504 billion (including “on-budget” and “off-budget” items) for a deficit of $483 billion. At 2.8% of GDP, as the media gleefully pointed out, it was proportionately the smallest since 2007. The deficit monster has been tamed. And unthinkable as that seemed a couple of years ago, it has disappeared as a political issue, even before the election! There is just one teeny-weeny problem: To fill that $483 billion hole, the US government borrowed $1.086 trillion. …”
Read the full article on: David Stockman’s Contra Corner