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Goldman Sachs Shocks All By Questioning ‘Efficacy’ Of Capitalism
Daily Caller ^ | 2-3-2016 | STEVE BIRR

Posted on 02/05/2016 7:43:20 PM PST by Citizen Zed

Goldman Sachs is questioning everything it knows about capitalism in the wake of a growing debate over the sustainability of corporate profits.

Profit margins are extremely high, mirroring levels seen before the financial crisis of 2008 and the dot-com bubble at the beginning of the century. Today stock buybacks are also happening at record levels, increasing corporate debt.

The S&P 500 has continued to rise and maintain relatively high valuations despite these trends, prompting a Goldman Sachs analyst letter that questions how capitalism in the world is currently operating. Markets have been essentially rewarding corporations that assume more and more debt through stock buybacks, boosting profit margins, reports Bloomberg.

The issue is one of the hottest debates in the financial sector, with bulls arguing that market performance is not necessarily tied to profit margins, while bears maintain that economic rules dictate a major market adjustment in the near term. Goldman Sachs analyzes both arguments, but tends to agree that bearish arguments will eventually come to fruition.

If the market does not experience an adjustment in profit margins however and valuations continue to stay high, something could be fundamentally wrong with our current system of capitalism according to Goldman analysts. Profit margins should follow a pattern where they eventually revert back to a mean historical average, and if they don't, strange forces are at work in global markets, reports Bloomberg.

"We are always wary of guiding for mean reversion," reads the Goldman Sachs analysis. "But, if we are wrong and high margins manage to endure for the next few years (particularly when global demand growth is below trend), there are broader questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism."


TOPICS: Chit/Chat
KEYWORDS: capitalism; goldmansachs
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To: TheTimeOfMan
“our current system of capitalism”. WTH does that mean?

Our 'current system of capitalism' is one that uses the printing press to socialize losses while allowing groups like Goldman Sachs to privatize profits.

True capitalism is a system of profit and loss, with the process of losses guiding capital from less capable hands to more capable hands via the market. With the advent of fiat money and a government controlled printing press to generate same the discipline of the market can be subverted by running the presses and handing out fresh claims on real capital to the politically favored.

41 posted on 02/05/2016 8:27:47 PM PST by Gunslingr3
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To: proxy_user

The NASDAQ may go up Monday, or Tuesday, because nothing is based on reality anymore. The NASDAQ going up has as much to do with reality as Obama’s unemployment numbers. But the sham can’t go on much longer. And this time, there are no parachutes.


42 posted on 02/05/2016 8:33:48 PM PST by SkyPilot ("I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6)
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To: proxy_user
They both belong to the club that feasted on Lehman Bros.
Fed staff members called a number of Wall Street C.E.O.s and asked them to attend an emergency meeting. Among the C.E.O.s were Jamie Dimon; Vikram Pandit, of Citigroup; Brady Dougan, of Credit Suisse Group; John Thain, of Merrill Lynch; John Mack, of Morgan Stanley; and Lloyd Blankfein, Paulson's successor at Goldman Sachs.

43 posted on 02/05/2016 8:38:35 PM PST by Milhous (Donald Trump supporter.)
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To: grey_whiskers
When you throw your employees overboard in favor of Third World manufacturing (no EPA, no inspections),

When you go where the rules aren't moving targets and politicians stay bought, you can make real money. The EPA has killed more jobs or caused them to be moved offshore than any other agency.

44 posted on 02/05/2016 8:39:21 PM PST by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: Citizen Zed
I wasn't that good at econ 101, but we were taught the law of diminishing returns. In order to remain profitable, a business or model has to expand continuously (I don't quite believe that except in an inflationary market).

With every ebb and flow of the markets, they buy up more and more assets. So they can now afford to go commie on us. Look at all the merging, growth and expansion of corporations in order to be competitive on the world market.

Eventually it seems like there's no place to go unless they size down and let people go. Then start all over again when there's an uptick in demand.

I suppose inflation can kill family businesses. In order to keep up from generation to generation, they have to open more stores. But we went for at least one whole generation and sometimes 2 or 3 where it worked for a family, through upturns and downturns in the economy. If they managed their money carefully, they could stay in business. The hours were long, and the work was hard. And there was greed sometimes in a captive, vulnerable market, like "company stores".

I see the biblical model as capitalism, very labor intensive, but not socialism. The people were supposed to tithe to the priests who were supposed to help the poor. If they weren't corrupt, it worked for centuries. Even the health care, such as it was, was for profit.

That's my take. If Goldman Sachs wants to tell us the capitalism model is flawed, they are up to something. It is flawed when it becomes corrupt. I don't believe in laissez-faire capitalism either, due to greed. There need to be some minimal controls. And integrity which we don't have much of any more.

Why do people want to live in the US and not Cuba or the Middle East? Still? It's certainly not because of socialism. Capitalism has brought us the highest standard of living for the most people in the history of the world. The poor can eat better than kings. There's just no comparison, flawed though it may be. Look at all the advances we have made due to incentives and inventions, most of which were done by white males in the US and western society. The new agenda, fueled by class envy and greed, has demonized those men.

But in the end, if they do not succumb to sinful ways, they will prevail. We're kind of reaching the point of no return by playing God though, trying to control everything.

45 posted on 02/05/2016 8:43:41 PM PST by Aliska ("No bank is too big to fail, and no executive is too powerful to jail." HRC 1/24/16)
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To: Jane Long

It is not just Goldman Sachs either. The core group of Teddy’s advisers are huge Globalist/CFR dirt bags. Ted, Heidi, (and her “5 dollars, 10 dollars, 20 dollars, a hundred dollars...whatever you can” creepy crazy Charlie Manson Lamps eyeballs video), do not want voters to know that. Cruz has a lot of folks fooled. (I know, I was one of ‘em for a long time.)


46 posted on 02/05/2016 8:45:57 PM PST by bobby.223 (Retired up in the snowy mountains of the American Redoubt and it's a great life!)
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To: LucyT

All businesses experience risk. If you want a perfect life, being a part of management in a very large company is not for you.

The really sad part in all this Goldman Sachs, oh, any large international corporation, is that many individuals in management want big wealth with little effort and zero risk. It doesn’t work that way.


47 posted on 02/05/2016 8:49:58 PM PST by SatinDoll (A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN IS BORN IN THE USA OF TWO USA CITIZENS)
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To: bobby.223

Agree.

And, I vaguely remember you being a CRuzer...glad you’ve come to the positive side :) Good to have you fighting the good fight to make America great, again!


48 posted on 02/05/2016 8:52:54 PM PST by Jane Long (Go Trump, go! Make America Safe Again :)
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To: Jane Long

I never was a full blown CRuzer, just thought of him as a good choice at one time. To many negatives with this guy now, (and not just little ones either), that I want to overlook. I’m sick of the Globalist/CFR/Illegal lover folks!


49 posted on 02/05/2016 9:06:42 PM PST by bobby.223 (Retired up in the snowy mountains of the American Redoubt and it's a great life!)
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To: Citizen Zed

Get the gov’t out of it for the most part and get back to free market capitalism. Get rid of the FED mandating interest rates and the DOL mandating wages and benefits. That’s a start.


50 posted on 02/05/2016 9:12:03 PM PST by Rusty0604 (1q)
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To: Jane Long

WTF?


51 posted on 02/05/2016 9:12:39 PM PST by Rusty0604 (1q)
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To: SatinDoll
Big American companies remind me of unprofitable Red China bloat.

"China in the Red"

Stress is etched all over [Feng Hui-Xiu's] face. For 28 years, the 44-year-old factory worker has worked at Beijing's sprawling Number One Machine Tool Plant. But the Chinese Communist Party has ordered all state-owned companies to become modern, profitable enterprises or face being closed down. For Feng Hui-Xiu and tens of millions of Chinese workers like her, the future is very uncertain.

It seems to me that all of that unprofitable China bloat got secularized during this past boom.

52 posted on 02/05/2016 9:13:12 PM PST by Milhous (Donald Trump supporter.)
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To: Citizen Zed

And cruz’s wife is one of these G-S globalist folks.


53 posted on 02/05/2016 9:15:41 PM PST by Secret Agent Man (Gone Galt; Not averse to Going Bronson.)
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To: bobby.223

I hear ya! I was once with him, too. Eyes definitely opened, now.

It’s amazing all of the connections and tentacles within the Globalist/CFR/Illegal-lover cabal you mentioned, isn’t it?


54 posted on 02/05/2016 9:22:41 PM PST by Jane Long (Go Trump, go! Make America Safe Again :)
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To: bobby.223

Everyone has — from us, to the Germans, the Swedes, and more whose elite are busy suppressing their ‘own’ people in favor of the agenda.

The difficult part is that actual communication is becoming difficult; the big ‘net social networks are unsurprisingly in collaboration with the elite, so that it’s impossible to get the truth past the mainstream media and will be for the internet media.

A long long time ago when dialup modems were still a thing, there was a set of private networks called FIDONet. People predicted that we would rue the day we lost those privately-maintained networks and ceded our collaborative powers to corporate and collective entities.


55 posted on 02/05/2016 9:27:40 PM PST by No.6
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To: Citizen Zed

Goldman Sachs is hardly in a “capitalist” business.

They are the biggest and most well-connected beneficiary of our soviet-style monetary planning authority, the Federal Reserve. They nominate many Treasury secretaries and give money to all politicians besides. Capitalism? That’s too risky. Its better to be connected to those printing the money and making the rules.


56 posted on 02/05/2016 10:09:24 PM PST by PGR88
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To: bobby.223

I am SO happy to read this bobby, I feared we had lost you to the dark side!

Why is it that so many negative things in our country revolve around goldman sachs...that name just pops up everywhere!


57 posted on 02/05/2016 10:15:50 PM PST by AllAmericanGirl44
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To: Citizen Zed

Sounds like they need to read Kondratieff. Yes, the way capitalism is currently constituted — with the managerial class, Goldman-Sachs included, thinking they are entitled to profits simply for being who they are — is ineffective and unsustainable. We are in the Kondratieff winter, the generation that thinks that way, doesn’t understand that capital formation takes effort. As Kondratieff found, studying capitalism at Stalin’s behest to “prove” it would collapse, capitalism will, with a bit of suffering for those currently at the top, fix itself and come out stronger when the upcoming generation that has to struggle actually gets to be in charge. (For his honest scholarship, Kondratieff was publicly sentence to ten years of exile in one of Stalin’s purges, then executed
extra-judicially the day he was sentenced.)


58 posted on 02/06/2016 3:03:49 AM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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To: Gunslingr3
Our 'current system of capitalism' is one that uses the printing press to socialize losses while allowing groups like Goldman Sachs to privatize profits.

It's called crony crapitalism!

Of course, the maggots who practice it are short-term thinkers.

They cross the aisle with their contributions, but they don't realize they are financing the progressive gallows from which, in the end, they will all hang!

59 posted on 02/06/2016 3:14:54 AM PST by cynwoody
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To: Citizen Zed

Article is wrong. Corporations use profits and excess cash to buy back their stock not debt. This may appear to increase debt/equity ratios as the repurchased stock is held as “Treasury Stock” a negative number. Profit percentages go up, earnings per share go up, and tangible worth goes up. This is a good move if long term liquidity is an issue.


60 posted on 02/06/2016 5:03:50 AM PST by Jimmy Valentine (DemocRATS - when they speak, they lie; when they are silent, they are stealing the American Dream)
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