CEO CrybabiesCorporate bosses are whining, even though they're reporting record profits. It's hard out there for a CEO. There's a Democrat in the White House, and Washington is being ruled by a coalition of socialists and anticapitalist thugs. There's uncertainty about taxes and policy. Business leaders are constantly being vilified for taking home huge paychecks without providing meaningful returns to shareholders, or creating jobs, or boosting wages. The newly passed financial-reform bill requires CEOs of public companies to measure and report the ratio of their pay to that of their workers. Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman is complaining that the Obama administration is like Hitler invading Poland.
With government and the media making life so difficult for CEOs, it must be nearly impossible to turn a profit. Right? Um, not really.
The headline number from the quarterly GDP report released by the Commerce Department last Friday was the sorry 1.6 percent growth rate of the economy in the second quarter. But the release also provided detailed data on corporate profits. And while the GDP number was disappointing, the latter was impressive. Corporate profits, which stood at $1.5 trillion in 2007, fell sharply to $1.26 trillion and essentially stagnated in 2009. But since the Obama presidency started, the trajectory in quarterly profits has reversed. Quarterly profits (reported at an annualized rate) rose from $1.18 trillion in the second quarter of 2009 to $1.42 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2009 to $1.64 trillion in the second quarter of 2010. In the second quarter of 2010, corporate profits were up 39.2 percent from the year-before quarter.
Corporate profits aren't just rising in absolute terms, they're rising in relative terms. Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are back up to nearly record highs. Check out this assemblage of quarterly GDP data for the last several years. If you divide line 17 (corporate profits with inventory and capital-consumption adjustments) into line 1 (overall GDP), you can calculate corporate profits as a percentage of GDP—i.e., the chunk of the economy that corporations are keeping as profits. If companies and business were under assault, you might expect that this proportion would be falling. But as the chart here shows, that's not what is happening.
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http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/31/ceo-crybabies.html
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