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 ...
Fixed.
Money laundering for drug lords is LEGAL??? Typically idiotic. Stick to what I say and forget your delusions. Most of the post makes even less sense than your other posts so you have achieved another height of ridiculousness.
I love the way you anti-free trade clowns argue; picking and choosing random sentences from various crackpots and stringing them together does not make them make sense or carry an argument. It is funny though.
You are gross under everything else.
No, you are confusing “dead on” with brain dead.
There is no slavery involved in free trade. Chinese workers are not slaves and your repeated posting of the LIE doesn’t make them such. If corporations make shoddy goods the market (individuals) will make them pay or the courts. I would be in more danger from poisons in your kitchen than any flowing from free trade.
Funny that I can avoid danger which you see everywhere. Clearly you need better judgment so you can too.
Like that “Beck’s” beer I had yesterday which was imported from the hated furriner, it kinda tasted funny....no, wait it tasted GREAT.
So lets count the stupidities in your post.
1 yet again you show no understanding of what free trade means;
2 clearly know nothing about its origin OR the origin of communism (although we have no idea what YOU think that word even means either);
3 now you think “free trade” for America started in 1980 this is some real hilarity;
4 no knowledge of real American history believing that the Civil War was started because of free trade;
5 you propose “protecting” Americans rights by depriving them of economic freedom and restricting what they can do within the world marketplace.
Now this was an incredible post wherein you packed so MUCH ludicrousness, lies and falsehoods into so few sentences. I am impressed.
Feel free to feel “denigrated” by my concept of free trade but it certainly should not result from that concept.
Nor has our current economic situation been a result of trade agreements. Our economy is in the toilet because government policies far more than because of trade agreements.
Why would people try and shift the blame from the federal government to private institutions? I mean allegedly conservative people, we know why Obama does this but why alleged conservatives?
Was India’s decision to buy billions of dollars worth of planes from Boeing part of its “economic warfare” plan? Now India is an enemy too? Is there any nation which is NOT an enemy among the fevered minds?
As to your remarks about the human dark side. None of it has any bearing on free trade any more than it does upon mathematics. Adam Smith demonstrated how greed and self-aggrandizement is reconciled through the markets. Market failures are the points where government involvement become justifiable to attempt corrections. When the assumptions which frame perfect competition are violated then government may be use.
Nothing you link can change the fact that the Chinese are not slaves. If every silly, crank and crackpot claim is weighed it still doesn’t make them slaves.
No one is hiring because they are facing huge health care costs and dealing with a president who is anti-business.
Free trade is clearly not the issue, a Marxist president is.
In any case profits and job increases do not move in tandem.
Thanks for posting the graphs they in no way prove anything you or the other howlers have claimed but are always interesting.
No, in other words other taxes are required other than tariffs.
Since you like pulling nonsense out of your butt pull out some info showing us all the nations which use a tariff for significant portions of the tax revenue. TODAY not in 1800.
Your language of course, being a free traitor, is gross and offensive.
You persist in pretending that government negotiated trade is free trade. It isn’t.
I suppose you believe the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is democratic and a republic just because those words are in the name.
Anything resembling the truth would be gross and offensive to you.
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