Posted on 05/31/2011 7:05:20 PM PDT by khnyny
To gaze upon the world of American corporations is to see a sunny place of terrific profits and princely bonuses. American businesses reported that third-quarter profits in 2010 rose at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the steepest annual surge since officials began tracking such matters 60 years ago. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which corporate profits climbed.
Staring at such balance sheets, you might almost forget that much of the nation lives under slate-gray fiscal skies, a place of 9.4 percent unemployment and record levels of foreclosures and indebtedness.
And therein lies the enduring mystery of this Great Recession and Not So Great Recovery: Why have corporate profits (and that market thermometer, the Dow) spiked even as 15 million Americans remain mired in unemployment, a number without precedent since the Great Depression? Employment tends to lag a touch behind profit growth, but history offers few parallels to what is happening today.
“Usually the business cycle is a rising-and-falling, all-boats-together phenomenon,” noted J. Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in the Clinton Treasury Department. “It’s quite a puzzle when you have this disjunction between profits on the one hand and unemployment.”
A search for answers leads in several directions. The bulls’ explanation, heard with more frequency these days, has the virtue of being straightforward: corporate profits are the economy’s pressure cooker, building and building toward an explosive burst that will lead to much hiring next year.
The December jobs numbers suggest that that moment has yet to arrive, as the nation added just 103,000 jobs, or less than the number needed to keep pace with population growth. The leisure industry and hospitals accounted for 83,000 jobs; large corporations added a tiny fraction.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Alinsky is the free traitor’s friend.
You don’t use expertise of others to make a bigger apple crop? Or produce containers so your apples can be shipped and therefore increase your sales? How about someone to stand at your apple stand while you go home and pick them so you have less down time for your sales?
Your comments make no sense.
Can't respond to my comments about the similarity in your views and those of the far Left wrt to trade I see. Not unexpected since all you do is throw up a few initials which you don't even understand. Especially hysterical is your view of history which crackpot are you relying on? Is he out of the sanitarium yet.
Why don’t you explain what the Doha round is and how it affects “free trade”.
Explain how an open border and illegal immigration is crucial to “free trade”
Then explain why and how our food import standards were ‘haromonized’ with countries of much lower sanitation standards and how it relates to “free trade”.
When you do that, I’ll believe you have some inkling about what “free trade” is.
Free traitors support global communism. Is that leftist or something else? I personally don’t care if you are left or rightist, I care that you are promoting the economic destruction of our nation and empowering communism and slave labor.
While I have never read anything that Ole Saul wrote about free trade it would be hard to see him supporting capitalism in any manner. Communist states never supported free trade policies.
You don’t answer a question with other questions. What do you believe “free trade” to be?
My analogy was meant to point out the there is no such thing as “excess” profit that automatically turns into investment in labor and production. For that to occur, the profits have to be anticpatible and unfettered.
When you don’t know what inflation, taxes, healthcare and other benefit costs will be, you don’t hire on hope. When you don’t know if the government is going to play favorites in your industry next week, you can’t plan for growth, you pocket your profits and evaluate your upcomming opportunities.
I sold a lot of apples last week. If that happens for 12 weeks in a row, I may begin to expand, but there has to be some consistancy.
The article was proposing a direct, virtually cause-and-effect, relationship between net earnings and hiring. Hiring is related more to production and markets than to earnings.
That being said, the Marxist would say, well if there is no relationship why can’t the public steal the profits and use them for the “greater good?” The answer is that government is a poor source of jobs and if quick reacting business has its profits stolen preventing retained earnings and investment capital then the general business economy cannot respond to opportunity when it arises and does no hiring for such.
Free trade has never been the policy of communist states. Your confusion prompts once again my question “What do you think free trade is?”
What do you think “free trade” means?
Well, that all depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
Free trade is trade without government regulation, not government regulated trade. As was stated in the WSJ, yesterday, “The cor of conceit of this administration’s economic policy is that it can achieve better results if government allocates capital to FAVORED companies (like GE, BNSF, Goldman Sachs, etc)rather than letting private markets do the job.” “The results so far have been underwhelming.”
In other words, it ain’t workin’. The other companies which are not receiving the government subsidies have no obligation to spend more money than is profitable to simply create jobs.
I’m waiting for you to explain to me the WTO and its relation to ‘free trade’, the Doha round and ‘free trade’ stance on illegal immigration and open borders.
While you’re at it, tell me what a ‘least developed nation’ is, free traitor, and how they figure int ‘free trade’ agreements.
Oh and one more thing, who makes ‘free trade’ agreements and who enforces them?
Oh dear, you gave away one of the answers to arrogantsob for questions I asked for in the post following yours.
arrogantsob you got a freebie, but you still need to explain those other things too, if you’re as knowledgeable as you say on the topic of ‘free trade’.
Hey, if they can force individuals (and companies) to buy health insurance, why can’t they force companies to hire people?
If A, I don’t see why not B.
You and I probably both know the theory—free trade enriches economies in the aggregate, but at a cost to specific employees who lost their jobs in the adjustment, so the aggregate economy can mitigate those isolated costs by subsidizing retraining, etc..
You’re right that the kind of free trade we’ve been pursuing hasn’t been free at all—and it has been subverting our sovereignty as well.
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