On what dates do the U.S. and Canada release their respective federal budgets?
In the US there is no set date. If all goes well there are multiple dates of importance. If it doesn't go well the budget process also may include continuing resolutions, shutdowns, and sequestrations. Canada does not have a set date on which a (Federal) budget plan is unveiled. In 2011 it was June 6th. In 2012 it was March 29th and in 2013 it was 21st March. To the best of my knowledge, there's no firm date requirement. The fiscal year for the US Federal Government starts on October 01, but if my memory serves me right, last time a budget was approved before the fiscal year started was during the Clinton administration.
This chart is full of shit. Iraq War costs barely register a blip.   [From NYT article](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/us/politics/20budget.html)  *WASHINGTON — For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.* His statement is false, for two reasons.  First, you don't want to compare month-to-month numbers.  The seasonality overwhelms and substantive changes.  It's like saying a retailer is growing strongly because December sales are much higher than November.  You need to compare with the previous December.  Second, 2017 is Obama's budget.  Trump didn't set taxes or expenditures. If you're willing to use OFX or QIF files, most Canadian banks can spit output more data than 90 days. The files are typically used to import into Quicken-like local programs, but can be easily parsed for your webapp, I imagine. I know some companies or entities have large incomes or expenses at certain times of the year, and like to close their books after these large events.  For example where I work,  the primary seasonal income comes after summer, so our fiscal year ends at the last days of October.  This gives the accountants enough time to collect all the funds, reconcile whatever they have to, pay off whatever they have to and get working on a budget for the next year sooner than a calendar year would. There also might be tax reasons.  To get all of your income at the beginning of your fiscal year, even if that is in the middle of the calendar year would allow a company to plan large deductible investments with more certainty.  I am not to sure of the tax reasons. Im gonna make up some numbers for this teaching moment.  2011: $60,000  2012: $50,000  2013: $100,000  2014: $70,000  2015: $60,000  2016: $75,000  2017: $90,000  2017 is the highest number since 2013. But before we had 2017 data, we only had up to 2016 data. In 2016, 2016 was the highest number since 2013.   We couldn't say the same about 2015 though. In 2015, 2014 was the highest number since 2013.   Such short timetables are kinda ridiculous to even claim. This type of number is only meaningful if its a big number of years like biggest deficit since 1953 (60ish years ago) "Are you sure you're using the same date range? If you're using Max, then you're not, as ^FTMC goes back to 12/1/1985 while ^GDAXI only goes back to 11/1/1990. If I enter a custom date range of 11/1/1990 through 10/24/2015, I get:  and:  which, other than the dates it chose to use as labels on the x-axes, look identical. (I tried to add the URLs of the charts, but it looks like the Yahoo! URLs don't include the comparison symbol, which makes them useless for this answer. They're easy enough to construct though, just add the secondary symbol using the Comparison button and set the date range using the calendar button.) On your PS, I don't know, as you can see by my charts it even chose different labels when the date ranges were identical (although at least it didn't scale different dates differently), so maybe it's trying to be ""smart"" and choose dates based on the total amount of data available for the primary symbol, which is different in the two cases." Citizenship matter for US reporting, but not for Canadian taxes.  If you are an American resident then you need only worry about US taxes and rules.  s Doesn't matter.  What concerns me is the potential, since it is very plausible that at some time in the near future the Feds will need to be violently fought by the citizens of the USA in order to correct the deviation of their allegiance. Maybe it's just because of the foundation date. If I start a company on August 1st, I would like its FY starts on that date too, in order to track my first whole year. Would be quite useless to finish my year on December, after just five months. I want to have data of my first year after a twelve months activity. Yes, it's good the economy is doing well.  Hopefully it helps the many dissatisfied Trump voters. It would be nice to see some of the anger dampen in the country.  The truth is that this data still *mostly* for Obama's economy.  Trump's budget didn't start until Oct, after Q3 finished.  So this report is for the time when the federal government was operating under budgets passed during the Obama era.  Economies have enormous momentum, and this one is still following its long established trajectory.  You probably should give Trump credit for regulatory changes, bully pulpit leadership, and those sorts of things.  So he definitely should get *some* credit, it's hard to know how much.  The stock market rally is very likely in response to expected tax cuts from a GOP government (although if you draw a line for the stock market starting in 2009, we're still on the trend). I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:  - [/r/metacanada] [Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Invests US$400 Million in WME│IMG](https://np.reddit.com/r/metacanada/comments/6sdk52/canada_pension_plan_investment_board_invests/)  [](#footer)*^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*  [](#bot) Yes, I am currently an undergrad student majoring in Finance. I have a strong interest in Accounting and Economics (Macro).  I have learned earlier today that due to the fact that people now live longer, our government spending increases (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc). But unfortunately, the funding that it draws from does not increase at a similar rate so the funding for other major aspects such as R&amp;D, Education, etc are being cut to offset the increase in government transfers.   Granted the Feds never spent much on education, why is it that the funding for R&amp;D in terms of percentage is so minuscule? Would it not be in each government's best interest to funnel money towards education, infrastructure, research &amp; development, etc? I'm sorry, when I learn one thing, about twenty billion other questions pop up (could be related or unrelated to what I had just learned) In addition to the company-specific annual business cycle reasons and company-specific historical reasons mentioned in the other answers, there is another reason. Accounting firms tend to be very busy during January (and February and March) when most companies are closing and auditing their calendar-year books.  If a company chooses its fiscal year to end at a different time of year, the accounting firms are more available, and the auditing costs might be lower. I wrote a small Excel-based bookkeeping system that handles three things: income, expenses, and tax (including VAT, which you Americans can rename GST).  Download it here. The picture talks is about assets on the Fed's balance sheet, which is very different than US government debt. Nor is there anything in the picture about corporate bottom lines, just US equities.   The implication of the picture is that the Fed's QE program is propping up US equity prices, and it is not a comment on the US debt or corporate earnings. You're reading things that simply aren't there.