CLINTON is AT LEAST $6 million in the red -- FEC EXPLAINED

On April 1st, the Clinton campaign was at least $6 million in the red! Read below for the full story.

The campaigns filed to the FEC last night, and the FEC has put out the raw data here:

http://query.nictusa.com/...

In this diary, I'll try to answer conclusively questions like:

How much money did Clinton receive for the primary race in March?
How big were her expenses?
How much cash on hand does she have?
How big are her remaining debts?
Is the Clinton campaign bankrupt?

I'll explain how to interpret the available data, by presenting some easy to understand hypothetical examples. I'm no accounting expert, but with use of common sense, we should be able to erase any misundstandings and doubts. If there's something in my analysis that is incorrect, please speak up asap. I'll update the diary throughout the day as more observations and conclusions become available.

A summary of the Clinton campaign finances are presented in this table from the FEC filing:

The first thing to note is that this table presents two things

1. A summary of the financial events in March.

2. A snapshot of the total financial situation as of March 31st.

We don't know what happened in the 20 days since March 31st. The data lets us know how things were 20 days ago.

So what happened in March?

CAMPAIGN INCOME
There are two types of income. Income for the Primary, and income for the General Election. Income for the General Election cannot legally be used until the candidate is nominated at the convention. If Clinton is not nominated, the GE income must be paid back to the donors. However, the GE income is still included in the FEC filings of the campaigns, with only an "invisible mark" indicating that this money is not "released" yet to the campaign. Unfortunately, Primary money and GE money are pooled together in the summary. To find out how much primary money Clinton has left, we have to rely on different more or less direct and reliable sources.

The total Clinton campaign income for March was 20.9 million. (In February, it was 35.8 million.) Here's a link to a FEC table indicating how much of the March income was for the primary:

http://query.nictusa.com/...

It says 12.6 million for the primary, 0.8 for the GE, and then 6.7 for "no election was supplied". I'm not sure what this means, so I'll take this as something worthy of investigation. The Clinton campaign has said that "almost all" of the 20.9 million was for the primary.

CAMPAIGN EXPENSES
This is probably the most original part of this diary, with some observations I have not seen elsewhere. The thing to note is that total disbursements are NOT the same thing as total expenses. The "total disbursements" in the table indicate how much money went out of the Clinton bank accounts. But money out may not cover your expenses. Then your are left with UNPAID bills, also known as debt. Money out may also be used for old debt, and then you can have more money going out than you needed for your new expenses. Some examples:

1. You have 50 million cash on hand. You have debts of 20 million. You have expenses of 10 million, and you pay them all upfront (as disbursements). Now you have 40 million cash on hand, and STILL exactly 20 million in debt. Here, expenses equaled disbursements.

2. You have 50 million cash on hand. You have debts of 20 million. You have no (new) expenses, but spends 10 million to pay off debt. You end up with 10 million in debt. Here, disbursements were larger than expenses, and your debt decreased.

3. You have 50 million cash on hand. You have debts of 20 million. You have new expenses of 15 million. You spend 5 million paying off old debts, and 5 million covering some of the new expenses. You are left with 20-5+(15-5) = 25 million in debt. Here, expenses were larger than disbursements, and your debt increased.

The point is, disbursements only show how much money left the house, not how the financial situation changed due to new expenses. The equation is:

expenses = disbursements + increase in debt.

But we know the increase in debt! In leevank's excellent diary, a rather alarming development is shown:

December: $4,987,425.29
January:  $7,576,700.48
February: $8,733,609.11
March:   $10,321,562.87

(Please note, these numbers do NOT include the 5 million loan from Hillary herself.)

So, we have:

March expenses = 22.4 + (10.3 - 8.7) = 24 million dollars

Now, there are two interesting comments to be made about this. First, the expenses were at least 4 million more than the primary income, that is, the financial situation worsened. Secondly, Obama's expenses were roughly 30-31 million (by the same method of calculation). That is, Obama only spent about 25% more than Clinton during the month of March. This is worth keeping in mind when comments are made about how Obama is gunning Clinton down with massive ad buys. He is (or was, at least) not really spending more money, but he is/was spending it differently (and, arguably, more effectively).

CASH ON HAND
Here we have the same primary/GE problem. The 31.7 million indicated in the FEC summary includes both. According to this post

http://www.dailykos.com/...

the GE number going IN to March was 21.5. This number can pretty much only increase (since the money cannot be spent [but it could be paid back]). We know that there was at least 0.8 income in the GE CoH number from the March income. We can conclude that the GE number going OUT of march was at least 22.3. Conversely, Clinton's primary cash on hand going out of March can at most be 31.7-22.3 = 9.4 million dollars. The Clinton campaign has said, without much clarification, that they have/had 8 million cash on hand.

BOTTOM LINE
A summary of our conclusions so far:

In March, and concluding on March 31st, the Clinton campaign

a) received at most $20.1 million for the primary.
b) had effective expenses of $24 million.
c) had at most $9.4 million cash on hand for the primary.
d) had unpaid bills/debts of $15.3 million dollars.
e) On April 1st, the Clinton campaign was at least $6 million in the red.

As a final remark, let this be noted: Once the services and bills are in the system (for example, the debt to Penn's firm), they can't just be ignored as in "hey, don't worry about that debt, we did it for free for you, Hillary". This would amount to campaign contributions above the legal limits. I don't know the rules for sure, but vaguely recall something about the firms/individuals somehow having to follow common practice in debt collecting, or they could be accused of contributing illegally. It would be interesting to hear from some legal experts.