ProShares UltraPro Short S&P500 (SPXU)

[zsvq1p]

gdl.. I appreciate your comments.

This is interesting fact.. This week, my employer (large $1.5 billion revenue company supplier to package goods) announced a price increase called it "inflationary" for the first time ever..

I expect a 20 percent drop from peak by end of this year. I do not however expect the end of this bull run. My target for SPX is 1950 for the top followed by a 20 percent haircut.

I did think there would be a budget fight.. However it turned out to be no fight at all.. Congress passes spending bill. Will a debt ceiling fight happen on Feb 7th? I doubt it.

Hard to say. I am not long here.. I have averaged down to under $16 but still on the wrong end of this trade by about 4%.

Harry Reid, Jack Lew differ on debt limit timing

By ZACHARY WARMBRODT and BURGESS EVERETT | 1/16/14 11:35 AM EST Updated: 1/16/14 4:37 PM EST

The Obama administration and Senate Democrats can’t seem to agree on when the debt ceiling will need to be raised.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Thursday that Congress should raise the debt limit by the end of February and not wait until early March to avoid any complications arising from the flow of revenue into the government’s coffers due to tax-filing season

“If Congress is looking at the numbers the way we are, we have the best data, they would be looking more at the end of February than any time in March,” Lew said during an onstage interview at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Asked a couple hours later when Congress must move to lift the government’s borrowing authority, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suggested lawmakers have more leeway than Lew suggested.

“That is not urgent. We keep getting different numbers on that. We think sometime in May that will be necessary,” Reid said. “Maybe it’s April. But we’ll deal with it.”

Following Reid’s remarks, his spokesman Adam Jentleson clarified that the Democratic leader takes Lew’s guidance “extremely seriously.”

“Senator Reid agrees with Secretary Lew that Congress needs to extend the nation’s borrowing authority well in advance of when extraordinary measures are exhausted,” Jentleson said in an email.

In December, Lew wrote to congressional leaders, warning that the government would reach its borrowing limit in late February or early March, but he is now adding more urgency to when this deadline will arrive.

“It’s a very unpredictable time of the year in terms of cash flow because people are filing for tax refunds, and when you start paying tax refunds, it’s a time of year when money goes out,” Lew said on Thursday. “A month later when people are paying their taxes, money comes in. You cannot get from here to there without extending the debt limit.”

The administration and Democratic leaders may be off on timing, but they are in harmony on another crucial point: They vow not to negotiate with Republicans who hope to extract spending cuts or entitlement reforms as a condition of raising the debt ceiling.

“The one thing the president made very clear yesterday — and he was extremely emphatic, as he was the last go-round on this — we will not negotiate on extending the debt limit, period,” Reid said, describing Senate Democrats’ visit to the White House Wednesday.

October, Congress passed a bill that suspended the debt limit through Feb. 7. After this point, Treasury will have to resort to so-called extraordinary measures — a set of accounting procedures that would temporarily allow the government to continue borrowing.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declined to directly comment on Lew’s prediction Thursday, and said he does not have his own estimate of when the nation will reach its debt limit. He said he didn’t have “any idea” if Congress will need to deal with the debt limit by late February.

“All I know is we should not default on our debt, we shouldn’t even get close to it,” Boehner said. “And I would hope that the House and the Senate would act quickly on a bill to increase the debt limit. What that vehicle is and how it’s going to be unveiled, we’ll find out soon enough.”


www.politico.com/story/2014/01/jack-lew-debt-ceiling-increase-102268.html