Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Reich: The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits From Jobs

As I've noticed for a long time, corporations no longer are focusing on U.S. consumers as their primary target.  Not to sound provincial and xenophobic, but I think the signs were there when instructions for products not only started showing up in a gazillion languages, but English wasn't even prominent....you had to dig through to find it.  I'm not really whining about that (well, maybe I am), I'm just saying it was a SIGN.

From July 26, 2010:
"Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they're making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.
So with all this money and profit, they'll start hiring again, right? Wrong - for three reasons.
First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that's where they're investing and expanding production."
the rest at HuffPost

No comments: