The US Treasury Department has announced that the government recorded a budget deficit on an annual basis of $244 billion last July, an increase of 10 percent compared to the same month last year. The Department explained, in a statement Monday, that the budget deficit increased last month by $23 billion from a deficit of $221 billion in July 2023. In the first ten months of fiscal year 2024, which began on October 1, the deficit in the United States decreased by 6 percent to $1.517 trillion, compared to $1.614 trillion in the same period of fiscal year 2023. The interest burden on outstanding US debt remained the biggest obstacle to the budget, as interest costs in the first ten months of the current fiscal year amounted to $956 billion, an increase of 32 percent over 2023. The campaign to raise interest rates launched by the Federal Reserve (the US central bank), which aims to curb inflation, has made issuing debt for the federal government more expensive. The weighted average interest rate on outstand ing government debt was about 3.33 percent at the end of last July, the highest since January 2010, and an increase of about half a percentage point from last year. Source: Qatar News Agency