Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

New Deal democrats Weekly Indicators for October 30 – November 3

Weekly Indicators for October 30 – November 3 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. One way I keep track of the producer side of the economy is via the long leading indicator of corporate profits and the short leading indicator of the stock market. As […]

Even with today’s slowdown, profit growth remains a big driver of inflation

This is a brief and targeted commentary by EPI’s Josh Bivens to which I have added input. The Fed has been flailing away at the economy in the belief Labor is the issue. Josh contends, product or profit markups have been a major issue. He does provide a foundation for his posit. I look to […]

Another image of labor’s broken back: $48,887 in profit per employee!

This article via Yahoo news caught my attention: Five years into recovery, Dow Companies squeeze workers as investors thrive I think this picture spells it out rather well.   “As the chart shows, the 30 huge companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average have barely nudged their employee ranks higher…” But this is even […]

Scott Brown Solves the Mystery of What All Those Mega-Corporations Are Doing With Their Record Profits

They’re spending it on lawyers! I’m not kidding.  Brown told a 27-year-old Fidelity Investments retirement specialist that big corporations can’t afford to hire people because they’re spending so much money on lawyers.  Which they have to do because of all those regulations.  Which is why he wants to “loosen regulations on big companies”: “So they […]

From Today’s New York Times Front Page, and From Tomorrow’s New York Times Op-Ed Page

Today, in the New York Times: With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold. … “So far in this recovery, corporations have captured an unusually […]

Corporations Don’t Need More Tax Breaks

by Linda Beale Corporations Don’t Need More Tax Breaks If you listen to the corporate lobbyists, and the right-wingers who plead their cases for them in Congress and in the media, you’d think that corporations are so heavily taxed that it is threatening their ability to continue to conduct business and be competitive in world […]

Where Has All The Money Gone, Pt IV – Dividends

We’ve already seen in previous installments of this series that since about 1980, I: corporate profits have soared, II: the slice of profits going to finance has soared even more, and III:  wages have stagnated.  Here we see what corporations have done with all that money.   There is a limited selection set: pay taxes, distribute […]

Where Has All The Money Gone, Pt I, Corporate Profits

INTRODUCTION 1) Rethug Speaker of the House John Boehner says that as a nation, “we’re broke“; Rethug presidential candidate Ron Paul claims America “should declare bankruptcy.”  I say these two are liars, and at least one of them is crazy. 2) Tyler Cowan says “we are poorer than we think we are,” due to mis-measurement […]

The Corporations That Occupy Congress

The Corporations That Occupy Congress  by David Cay Johnston via taxprofblog and Reuters Some of the biggest companies in the United States have been firing workers and in some cases lobbying for rules that depress wages at the very time that jobs are needed, pay is low, and the federal budget suffers from a lack […]

CORPORATE TAXES AND INVESTMENT

Yesterday in the New York Times Greg Mankiw — a professor of economics at Harvard, an advisor to the governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and a former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under president Bush — had a column in which he argued that a cut in […]