Withholding tax collections grew enough in August to support existing market trends. Non-subscribers, click here for the rest of the story.
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Meanwhile, after my repeated warnings that the tax collection data did not support the BLS monthly nonfarm payrolls fiction, the other shoe dropped. The BLS announced a downward benchmark revision of 800,000 jobs for the year. This was due to an average monthly overstatement of “only” 67,000 jobs per month. Non-subscribers, click here for the rest of the story.
And let’s not forget the monthly revisions, which are often material. What a joke. I’ll stick with analyzing the tax data, which tells us all we need to know about the all-important Federal revenues in real time. That, secondarily, tells us something about the US economy, and how much excess liquidity it might be generating from business profits and employment income. Excess income becomes excess liquidity in bank accounts and money market funds, available to buy stocks and bonds.
Regardless of how misleading the jobs reports may be, nominal revenue growth, from both jobs and inflation, has been strong enough to restrain the growth of Treasury supply and enable the US Treasury to build an enormous hoard of cash while cutting bond and note issuance.
That doesn’t change the fact that there’s still a tsunami of supply coming. But if the mix emphasizes T-bills, the market can readily fund that through using the T-bills as collateral for repo at 97% of face value.
Of course, whether it will do that or not depends on psychology, which we consider with the analysis of ratios of stock prices to liquidity in other reports.
There’s not enough evidence yet in the tax data to suggest that that strong revenue growth holding back the growth of Treasury issuance has changed. Withholding tax revenue rebounded in August enough to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx July. There’s enough revenue to xxxxxxxxx xxxxx expected T-bill xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx result of September estimated tax collections. The Treasury has already posted a modest T-bill paydown for this week. We’ve estimated that xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxx, once the quarterly tax windfall is collected on September 16.
To see the data for August visualized and learn what to expect …
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