US Treasury Posts Gigantic $1.16 Trillion Shortfall in Fiscal 2017, Hilariously Points out “Where We Are Headed”
by Wolf Richter
WolfStreet.com
Feb 19, 2018
Just add tax cuts and ballooning expenditures. The media chose to silence the report to death.
“If a tree fell in a forest and nobody heard it, did it really make a sound?” asks our favorite fiscal gadfly and Director of Research at Truth in Accounting, Bill Bergman, referring to the media coverage that the Treasury Department’s “Fiscal Year 2017 Financial Report of the U.S. Government” has received, which was, at the time he wrote it 24 hours after the February 15 release of the report: “Nothing. Zip. Scratch.”
Friday’s issue of the Wall Street Journal did not say a word about our public purse, or what happened to it last year. In the “What’s News” section on the front page, we learn about compelling things like “Billionaire investor Thiel is relocating to Los Angeles,” “Nestle’s sales growth last year was the slowest in decades,” and “U.S. motor vehicle deaths remained near decade-high levels in 2017.”
But we don’t learn anything about the financial condition of the federal government, from neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times.
The largest financial institution in world history issued its annual report yesterday, and nobody cares.
That’s probably a good thing, given the kind of fiasco it is:
Here’s a summary of the salient data points of the FY 2017 Financial Report of the U.S. Government (full PDF).
The Rest…HERE
