U.S. Posts Widest Monthly Surplus Since 2008 on Revenue

The U.S. posted its widest budget surplus in five years in April, swelled by stronger individual and corporate income-tax receipts.

The surplus for the month when tax payments are due increased to $112.9 billion, the biggest since April 2008, from $59.1 billion a year earlier, the Treasury said in its monthly budget statement today in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 24 economists was for an April surplus of $112 billion.

A strengthening economy is helping narrow a U.S. fiscal deficit that has exceeded $1 trillion in each of the past four years and pushed the Treasury Department near its legal borrowing limit. U.S. employers added 1.4 million workers in the October-April period, boosting government revenue and reducing the need to sell debt.

“This receipts surge has bought the Treasury a lot of time to stay under the debt limit,” Mike Englund, chief economist at Action Economics LLC in Boulder, Colorado, said in an interview. “Without the pressure of the debt limit, players in Washington have little incentive to come to a debt deal.”

The U.S. 10-year note yield was 1.90 percent at 2:35 p.m. in New York, after earlier touching the highest since March 26, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices.

For the first seven months of the 2013 financial year that began Oct. 1, the deficit shrank 32 percent to $487.6 billion from the same period from a year before.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/u-s-posts-widest-monthly-surplus-since-2008-on-revenue.html