MAGA Dotard madly begging and borrowing, bonds falling like shit

[Ang4MohTrump]

https://www.interest.co.nz/bonds/92...suance-starts-week-support-widening-us-fiscal

A heavy wave of US T-bill and Treasury bond issuance starts week to support widening US fiscal deficit. Bid-cover lowest in a decade, foreign central banks buying
Posted in Bonds February 21, 2018 - 08:25am, Jason Wong

By Jason Wong



In a slow start to the week, US Treasury yields have drifted higher, helping support the USD while the NZD is mixed on the crosses.

With the US public holiday on Monday and a lack of key economic releases, it has been a fairly slow start to the week. The market has been focused on the heavy wave of US T-bill and Treasury bond issuance this week – the start of a permanent increase in supply, as the Fed gradually reduces the size of its balance sheet and the US fiscal deficit widens significantly from here.

With not much else going on, this saw US Treasury yields drift higher during the Asian trading session, up to a high of 2.925% last night, drifting back down to 2.89% just ahead of the 3-mth and 6-mth T-bill auction before drifting back up to the current 2.91%. Bid-cover for the 3-month auction wasn’t great but it improved for the 6-mth auction, with signs of foreign central bank buying.


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In economic news, Sweden’s underlying CPI figure for January came in 0.2 percentage points lower than expected at 1.7%, dowsing expectations for a rate hike anytime soon and making SEK the weakest of the major currencies, down 1% overnight and 1.3% lower since this time yesterday. The lack of inflation for an economy that has been traveling pretty well, supported by a cheap real exchange rate, negative interest rates, quantitative easing and a booming housing market is telling. It supports the view that some global disinflationary impulse is at work, something that applies when we look at a lot of other countries. It might well have been coincidental, but the timing of that release matched the peak in US 10-year yields overnight and German bund yields. The data certainly give some food for thought about the inflation outlook ahead for other countries.

In the day ahead, there’ll be some focus on Australia wage data, with some pick-up required to awake the RBA from its neutral policy stance.

Markit PMIs for the US and euro area are expected to remain strong, indicative of the strong global growth pulse. The Fed’s Harker (non-voter) speaks while the BoE’s top brass, including Governor Carney speak in London tonight.



https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...d-market-braces-for-supply-wave-idUSKCN1G20UH

Jittery U.S. bond market braces for supply wave
Richard Leong
3 Min Read

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bond investors, who have been on edge over signs of growing inflation and a possibly more aggressive Federal Reserve, will have their work cut out for them as the U.S. government seeks to sell $258 billion worth of debt this coming week.

FILE PHOTO: The Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington September 16 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
The Treasury Department began ramping up its debt issuance earlier this month to fund the expected growth in borrowing tied to the biggest tax overhaul in 30 years and a two-year federal spending package.

Last year’s tax reform is expected to add as much as $1.5 trillion to the federal debt load, while the budget agreement would increase government spending by almost $300 billion over the next two years.

Analysts worry the combination of a rising budget deficit, faster inflation and more Fed rate increases have ratcheted up the risk of owning Treasuries.

Those concerns pushed benchmark 10-year Treasury yields US10YT=RR up to 2.944 percent, a four-year peak last week, Reuters data showed.

Treasury bill and two-year yields US2Y=RR have reached their highest level in more than nine years.

The five-year Treasury yield US5YT=RR is hovering at its highest levels in nearly eight years, while seven-year yield US7YT=RR climbed to levels not seen since April 2011.

The increase in U.S. yields may entice investors seeking steady income in the wake of the rollercoaster sessions on Wall Street and other stock markets this month, analysts said.

“While the rise in yields could draw additional demand, investors have remained very picky on where they decide to buy front-end rates,” TD Securities strategists wrote in a note.

“We therefore look for relatively cautions demand at this week’s auction series even as we view the 2-year part of the curve as relatively attractive,” they added.

(For a graphic on U.S. Treasury bill, short-to-medium term note yields, click reut.rs/2BELNTs)


The heavy Treasury supply will kick off on Tuesday with $151 billion worth of bills including record amounts of three-month and six-month T-bills.

The rest of the debt sales will spread over a holiday-shortened week with $28 billion of two-year fixed rate notes on Tuesday; $35 billion in five-year debt on Wednesday and $29 billion in seven-year notes on Thursday.

The Treasury Department also plans to add $15 billion to an older two-year floating-rate issue.

U.S. financial markets are closed on Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.

“As a point of clarification, we’re confident in the depth of demand for Treasuries -– the more relevant question is how much of an accommodation will be needed,” BMO Markets analysts said in a note.

(For a graphic on U.S. Treasury bill, short-to-medium term debt supply, click reut.rs/2C4XEeM)

 

[Ang4MohTrump]

 

[Ang4MohTrump]

Who does not need money? Look at my war spendings:

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/n...-Day-for-the-War-on-Terror-20171101-0013.html

Report: US Spends $250 Million per Day for the War on Terror

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  An aerial picture of the U.S. Department of Defense (the Pentagon). | Photo: Reuters

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Published 1 November 2017

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The Department of Defense’s “cost of war” report suggests that the U.S. has spent $250 million per day for the past 16 years on ‘defense.’

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The Department of Defense’s “cost of war” report suggests that the U.S. has spent $250 million per day for the past 16 years on ‘defense.’


According to a newly published United States Department of Defense (DoD) “cost of war” report, U.S. taxpayers have shelled out $1.46 trillion for war since September 11, 2001, when the War on Terror began.

RELATED:
US House Passes Record Military Budget, More Than Trump Request

This amounts to around $250 million per day.

The report was published by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog and covers the period of September 11, 2001 to mid-2017.

As the report notes, nearly $1.3 trillion of the total cost spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone. On top of this, continuing operations in Afghanistan and the U.S.-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria has totalled $120 billion.

U.S. President Donald Trump promised to rebuild America’s military which he sees as less extravagant than it ever has been.

"Our active-duty armed forces have shrunk from 2 million in 1991 to about 1.3 million today," he said in a speech. "The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships during this same period of time. The Air Force is about one-third smaller than 1991. Pilots flying B-52s in combat missions today. These planes are older than virtually everybody in this room."

Part of Trump’s plan to ‘rebuild’ the U.S.’ military is to make sure that the military is "funded beautifully."

The Trump administration has proposed a $603 billion defense budget, which well exceeds the cap of $549 billion, and would require the U.S. Congress to make spending cuts in other areas.

In July, the House of Representatives approved $696.5 billion in defense spending, which includes a base budget of $621.5 billion and $75 billion in ‘Overseas Contingency Operations dollars’, commonly referred to as ‘war money’. Conversely, the Senate passed a $640 billion base defense budget with a $60 billion allocation for war money. Both versions of the budget well exceed the Trump administration’s proposal, making this defense budget, by far, the largest defense budget in U.S. history.

While the U.S.’ current and proposed military spending is massive, the DoD’s “cost of war” report did not take into account other collateral costs of war, including veteran’s benefits and other related costs.

International Business Times notes that: “The report’s costs include only direct war-related expenses such as operating and maintaining bases, procuring equipment, and paying for and feeding troops.” The report does not include intelligence spending on the War on Terror, nor does it include veteran’s benefits.

Harvard Kennedy School professor Linda Bilmes estimated in 2011 that the cost of veteran’s benefits would range between $600 billion - $1 trillion. However, since Bilmes’ study, the number of veterans receiving benefits has skyrocketed. Current estimates project the figure to be $674 billion over the next 40 years.

RELATED:
US Military, Already World's Largest, Pushes for Budget Limit Removal, to 'Project Power'

The U.S. intelligence apparatus also operates under a $52.6 billion annual operating budget, which includes 16 agencies, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) soaking up the lion’s share of $14.7 billion, according to leaks that were revealed by Edward Snowden. The CIA spent $1 billion alone annually training and arming military opposition factions in Syria.

The report also does not take into account the large military-contractor economy that has surged around the War on Terror, which is currently valued at around $674.4 billion.

The War on Terror is the second most expensive war in U.S. history, trailing well behind (but perhaps not for long) World War II, which costed an estimated $4.1 trillion in today’s dollars. For comparison, the long and drawn out Vietnam War costed around $770 billion, with an additional $250 billion if veteran’s benefits are taken into account.



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War on Terror Defense Spending United States War & conflict Syria Iraq Afghanistan CIA Military expenditure
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[Ang4MohTrump]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-dollars-of-war-costs/?utm_term=.973d3775906b


Trump’s Afghanistan troop increase adds to $1 trillion in war costs


By Steven Mufson August 23, 2017 Email the author
2:58
Trump's speech on Afghanistan, in three minutes


President Trump unveiled a new strategy for the U.S. war in Afghanistan on Aug. 21. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

This article has been updated for clarification of war cost estimates.

President Trump said the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan was “not a blank check,” but his decision to send more troops will add billions of dollars a year to the already-towering war costs, which have topped $1 trillion in Afghanistan alone over the past 16 years.

And the government will still be paying for war veterans' health-care costs for at least another half century.

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Direct U.S. spending on the war in Afghanistan will rise to approximately $840.7 billion if the president’s fiscal year 2018 budget is approved, according to Anthony Cordesman, a military strategy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That includes the total cost estimated by the Congressional Research Service for the 2001 to 2014 fiscal years, and money from the Defense Department’s overseas contingency budgets for the fiscal years 2015 to 2018.

The cost of the war also includes State Department spending and massive obligations for veterans’ medical and disability costs. And veterans are filing claims in greater numbers and for more serious injuries than in past wars.

[Here are six costly failures from America’s longest war. No. 1: Cashmere goats.]

To meet those needs, the Department of Veterans Affairs has more than doubled the size of its staff to 350,000 employees since 2001. And its budget has swelled to more than $185 billion a year, up from about $60 billion in 2001, according to Linda J. Bilmes, a faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

This is in addition to about $212.6 billion in direct spending to care for war veterans since 2001, when terrorists’ attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon triggered U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. That figure is an estimate by Neta C. Crawford, a political-science professor at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University.

And that, in turn, is a fraction of the eventual cost of disability and health-care payments as those same veterans get older.

“Historically, the bill for these costs has come due many decades later,” Bilmes said. “The peak year for paying disability compensation to World War I veterans was in 1969 – more than 50 years after Armistice.” Bilmes, who co-authored a book about Iraq called “The Three Trillion Dollar War” with economist Joseph Stiglitz, said that if the Department of Veterans Affairs were run like a business, this money would be booked as deferred compensation and would show up on the government's balance sheet.

Bilmes and Cordesman agree that the costs of the wars are 20 times or more larger than initial estimates by members of the George W. Bush administration. But they caution that coming up with war costs is an inexact science.

Cordesman noted that the overseas contingency budgets are “padded” and “deliberately obfuscated” to make it easier to win congressional approval for certain spending items that are not, in fact, linked to war costs. He said that could account for a substantial amount of the contingency budget, and that the Afghan war costs include some overhead costs from other conflicts. Bilmes noted that the Defense Department’s regular budget has also ballooned, using the threats from abroad to justify bolstering the military baseline. She said that the Pentagon’s baseline budget had climbed a total of $1 trillion since 2001. Cordesman complained that there is “no federal report that breaks down real world costs.”

The costs of war have been controversial ever since the Bush administration launched its military campaigns on the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. In September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then Bush’s chief economic adviser, said that the “upper bound” of the cost of war against Iraq would be $100 billion to $200 billion. Other administration members attacked his estimate as being too high, and then-White House budget director Mitch Daniels said the figure would be between $50 billion and $60 billion.

Estimates of the cost of both wars combined by Crawford and the Watson Institute put the price tag so far at $4.8 trillion by fiscal years 2017 and 2016, respectively.

The cost of war has also imposed economic costs on the United States. While much of the spending has gone to domestic health-care providers and defense contractors, much of the war spending has been wasted or destroyed on the battlefield without improving U.S. productivity or making consumer goods. The U.S. Agency for International Development has also spent tens of billions of dollars on projects in Afghanistan, many of which have failed.

One example of waste: A $6 million Pentagon project to send nine rare Italian goats to breed with those native to Afghanistan, hoping that this would improve the animals’ undercoats and the quality of the cashmere they yield.

In addition, war costs have been largely financed by borrowing, adding interest costs to the federal budget.

[‘It’s like everyone forgot’: On a familiar battlefield, Marines prepare for their next chapter in the Forever War]

The Obama administration requested more than $44 billion for fiscal year 2017 for the Afghanistan war, a number that will likely increase with the U.S. troop presence that Trump is expected to boost by about 4,000.

Bilmes and Cordesman noted that the per-troop cost of maintaining an active duty soldier is high, more than $4 million per person versus a figure closer to $1 million in 2001. But Cordesman cautioned that much of the cost is overhead and adding 4,000 additional troops might raise the Afghan war costs by about $2 billion to $4 billion a year if they use existing infrastructure used in earlier fighting.

“The unit costs per man is extremely high but that’s because you have large and expensive bases and very few people,” he said. “Putting more people in doesn’t raise costs by the percentages you’d expect.”

Bilmes lamented that Trump’s desire to cut State Department spending would undercut some of the initiatives the president mentioned in his speech to the nation Monday night.

“The crazy budgetary dissonance in the president’s plan is that he is trying to cut the State Department budget by at least 20 percent at same time he is laying out a plan that calls for extremely delicate diplomatic negotiations with Pakistan, India and NATO,” she said. “How is that achievable? That just doesn’t add up.”

Read more:

How Trump is changing America's foreign policy

 

[Ang4MohTrump]

https://www.strategic-culture.org/n...18-alone-could-end-us-homelessness-twice.html

EDITOR'S CHOICE | 09.02.2018
Afghanistan War Spending, in 2018 Alone, Could End US Homelessness – TWICE

While the United States government spends $45 billion on the 17th year of the Afghanistan War, it ignores the fact that just half of that money could be used to virtually end homelessness in the U.S. annually

Rachel BLEVINS

Defense Department officials are claiming that the cost of the United States’ longest war in history will be $45 billion in 2018, which is actually double to estimate of what it would cost to end homelessness in the U.S. annually.

Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, said that he expects the Afghanistan war to cost American taxpayers $45 billion this year, which in addition to logistical support, will include about $13 billion for U.S. forces, $5 billion for Afghan forces, and $780 million for economic aid.

Schriver made the announcement during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan also spoke, and said he believes the United States’ policy “acknowledges that there isn’t a military solution or a complete solution.”

“I understand it’s America’s longest war, but our security interests in Afghanistan, in the region are significant enough… to back the Afghan government in their struggle against the Taliban,” Sullivan said.
Over 31,000 civilian deaths have been documented in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan began documenting civilian casualties in 2009, and the combined number of civilians who were killed and injured that year was nearly 6,000. The number has steadily increased over the years, and in 2016, it reached a record high with nearly 3,500 killed and nearly 8,000 injured.

A report from the UNAMA noted that in 2017, the death rate for children increased by 9 percent over the previous year, and the death rate for women increased by 23 percent. The report also claimed that an increase in airstrikes has led to a 43 percent increase in causalities.

The Hill reported that the Defense Department officials did receive some criticism from senators such as Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, who questioned why the Taliban would want a political settlement now when they already “control more territory than they did since 2001” when the U.S. invaded the country—claiming the purpose was to defeat the Taliban.
Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, also criticized the massive 2018 budget for the Afghanistan War, and argued that after 16 years, Afghans still “don’t seem to be able to defend themselves,” and for U.S. taxpayers, billions of dollars are “just being thrown down a hatch in Afghanistan.”

“I think there’s an argument to be made that our national security is actually made more perilous the more we spend and the longer we stay there. … We’re in an impossible situation,” Paul said. “I just don’t think there is a military solution.”
Paul has a history of criticizing the amount of money the U.S. government spends in foreign countries, especially on wars in the Middle East. After Trump vowed to continue the longest war in U.S. History in August 2017, Paul criticized the move and asked when the U.S. would start focusing on its own country.

“We spent billions of dollars—I think it’s over $100 billion—building roads in Afghanistan, blowing up roads in Afghanistan, building schools, blowing up schools, and then rebuilding all of them,” Paul said. “Sometimes we blow them up, sometimes someone else blows them up, but we always go back and rebuild them. What about rebuilding our country?”

Paul has a point, and the money that is being used to kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan is desparately needed in the United States. According to estimates from Mark Johnston, the acting assistant housing secretary for community planning and development, “homelessness could be effectively eradicated in the United States at an annual cost of about $20 billion.”

If the United States government cut its budget for the Afghanistan War in half, and put half of the money towards ending homeless in America, it could make a difference. If the government gave the entirety of the money it is using for endless proxy wars in the Middle East back to the taxpayers it was originally stolen from so that they could invest it in helping the individuals in need in their own communities, it could work wonders.

thefreethoughtproject.com

 

[Ang4MohTrump]

MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!


$$$$$$$ pse!

 

[winnipegjets]

Make America Great Again = Make America Broke Again