Financial Meltdown

US budget deficit wider-than-expected in April

The US government suffered a wider-than-expected budget deficit of 82.69 billion dollars in April, the Treasury Department said Wednesday.

It was nearly four times the deficit chalked up a year earlier and the largest ever recorded in April.

Most analysts had expected the April deficit, the 19th consecutive month of federal red ink, to be about 52 billion dollars.

The latest data brought the deficit for the first seven months of the 2010 fiscal year ending September 30 to 799.68 billion dollars, slightly lower than 802.9 billion dollars during the same period last year.

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The White House had warned that the deficit for the 2010 fiscal year could swell to 1.555 trillion dollars, eclipsing the prior year's record of 1.415 trillion dollars due to massive spending to stimulate recovery from the worst recession in decades.

U.S. posts 19th straight monthly budget deficit

The U.S. full-year deficit this year is projected at $1.5 trillion on top of a $1.4 trillion shortfall last year.

White House budget director Peter Orszag told Reuters Insider in an interview on Wednesday that the United States must tackle its deficits quickly to avoid the kind of debt crisis that hit Greece.