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 ...
Heavy industry was killed by US government policy and the unions not free trade.
Do you laugh at every absurd distortion and lie or just some?
“Big corporations have no interest in helping the USA economy.”
I owned and ran a small corporation and I guarntee you I have no interest in helping the US economy, never did and never will!!!
The only reason to be in business is profit.
A statement like that, made by a "Captain of Industry", during WWII would have got that idiot maimed or killed. I hope one day the our country can return the favor.
Now that you free traitors have killed heavy industry and left America defenseless economically, can you leave the corpse alone? At this point, free traitors are committing necrophilia on the tiny husk that domestic "big iron "manufacturing and heavy industry has become.
My pay is so high I can hire people to respond to you. No knowledge or intelligence is required to be able to deliver devastating rejoinders to you.
Perhaps you should read it again. Since it does not contradict anything I have said except, of course, in your mind.
Are profits really up or is the dollar just way down?
Industry isn’t expanding because of the great uncertainty that is hanging over the country due to the over wrought regulatory environment of the Obama administration. Everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop, or Obama to leave
office.
Sorry, my crackpot friend, but the problems the American economy (still the most productive in the world unbeknownst to you) face are the result of government idiocy much of which you support. Free trade only makes it more resilient and productive.
Keep your sexual fantasies out of this.
Maybe you should tell us?
I did. I am sure you have a “preferred customer” discount.
Everything you say about ‘free trade’ has been said ad nauseum on this site for years. It’s like you’re a clone of all the other free traitors that post here. You insult people, you throw out useless comments and sweeping generalizations about ‘free trade’ making the economy better, you DON’T post any facts that justify your position. You complain about articles posted supporting the anti-free traitors, but you can’t refute any of the facts in them.
You could be any one of the free traitors posting here, you don’t have an original thought or plain fact to back up your statements.
On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that the last 30 years of ‘free trade’ policy have DEVASTATED the American economy. The policies are CLEARLY redistributive, as in communist, as the free trade agreements and rhetoric spell out.
You’re the one showing a lack of reasoning power. The only excuse for it must be that you are regurgitating the same old tired crap the free traitors have posted many many times.
You are in denial. We don’t have free trade in this country any more. We have nothing but crony capitalism and the Democrats are the masters of it. The Democrats are promoting job creating projects in the US which will help create jobs in underdeveloped countries.
Right now, they are pushing a coal terminal in my county that will ship coal to China and hopefully other developing countries to be used in cement plants and smelters in those countries, not ours.
What is happening is because of ‘free trade’ agreements. I quote the term because it is a false name.
The Democrats and Republicans are behind the wholesale looting of our economy.
Nixon opened up relations with China, Bush 1 started the economic ‘teams’ brainstormed the idea of a global trade group and initiated ‘free trade’ which is really global cabal regulated trade. You see them meeting at the G8 and G20 meetings. They had decided a few decades ago that China was to be the manufacturing base for their concept of ‘global economy’, because of virtually no environmental laws, no legal system to sue if environmental or industrial harm is done, and above all the availability of communist controlled slave labor.
Under Clinton administration the WTO was formed, the GATT which set out how the globalists would develop ‘trade rules’. This completely circumvents the congressional responsibility to regulate trade and is completely unconstitutional. We saw the beginning of the end of our economy when NAFTA was put in place. It showed that American people would accept the corruption of our government system and that the multiculturalism social engineer was changing American’s desire to stand up for their own country and culture.
The Bush II administration put the global traitors in full force using the US trade representatives office, the state department and USAID to completely cut elected representation from having any decision making ability in the foreign aid and nation bribing process. By the end of the Bush administration, Congress is completely without their lawful activities and now all they do is insider trading, take their marching orders from the G8 not the American people, and apparently spend their time tweeting pictures of their private parts around the world.
No wonder congress has the lowest approval rating ever, below 10% I think, but Americans still aren’t cleaning house and reinstating constitutional government.
There are still free traitor lackeys on this website extolling the wasteland of corruption America has become based on their agenda and philosophy.
When will America gather the tatters of her culture and fight to bring it back to health?
O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,
The home of the brave and the free,
The shrine of each patriot’s devotion,
A world offers homage to thee;
Thy mandates make heroes assemble,
When Liberty’s form stands in view;
Thy banners make tyranny tremble,
When borne by the red, white, and blue,
Traitors are those supporting government control of trade. Americans support free enterprise.
You not he puts the advent of free trade with the Reagan administration. Apparently Ronnie is a traitor, too.
You NOTE he puts the advent of free trade with the Reagan administration. Apparently Ronnie is a traitor, too.
Michael Powell and the NYT are morons. Who would hire now when you don’t trust or know the cost in the near future?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.