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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (71276)	11/16/2007 2:57:21 PM
From: Archie Meeties	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Corporate profits have been growing since...well, since the late 70's with just a few quarters of contraction thrown in. Perhaps you're thinking of the rate of change of growth? That did drop after the tech bubble, and is now coming back (well until this quarter probably). The graph on the right captures that data public.deloitte.com Also, as I'm sure you are aware, the input costs of labor and raw material varies greatly from company to company. For example, in airlines it is around the number you mentioned, but for software design and many other tech, raw materials are in the low single digits. They are mostly beneficiaries of commodity increases as finding commodities is increasingly a tech driven process. For example, many of the new oil and gas discoveries in the old US fields are because of the heavy use of computing and modeling based on enriched seismic data. But this is debating the past, the future I'm sure will hold many new surprises.

To: RealMuLan who wrote (71276)	11/16/2007 3:43:47 PM
From: rich evans	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

What do you think? Asian Development Bank Says I'm Right About China by Bryan Caplan ECON LOG BLOG In Cross-country Comparisons I recently doubted that the Chinese economy lives up to its reputation. Now the Financial Times says that the Asian Development Bank is backing me up: In a little-noticed mid-summer announcement, the Asian Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China's economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China's size using purchasing power parity methods. The results tell us that when the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this year, China's economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than previously stated. This more accurate picture of China clarifies why Beijing concentrates so heavily on domestic priorities such as growth, public investment, pollution control and poverty reduction. The number of people in China living below the World Bank's dollar-a-day poverty line is 300m - three times larger than currently estimated. How could an error of this magnitude happen? Until recently, China had never participated in the careful price surveys needed to convert accurately its gross domestic product into PPP dollars. The World Bank's estimates based on summary data from the late 1980s probably overstated China's PPP gross domestic product even then. Up to now, the bank has revised its estimate very little. In the meantime, China has repeatedly raised the prices of food, housing, healthcare and a range of other non-traded goods and services. These reforms should have lowered the PPP adjustment, but the bank left it basically unchanged. The lesson: Steve Levitt's quip that "People lie, numbers don't" is once again way off - because all numbers are made by people.