Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Loading...
Myth Busting

The Best Thing You’ll Read Today: Settling the Profit Margin Debate

You should read this post by Jesse Livermore on profit margins (you can also find him on Twitter here).  He goes through a meticulous macroeconomic analysis of the corporate profit margin debate, how it’s been misleading, how it’s been useful and how to improve it.  Here’s a snippet of some of my favorite parts, but you should spend some time reading the whole thing:

cpataxgdp

This latter chart, CPATAX/GDP, and that of its twin brother, CPATAX/GNP, is anillusory result of flawed macroeconomic accounting.  In the paragraphs that follow, I’m going to try to clearly and intuitively explain why.  Hopefully, the chart will disappear once and for all.

For investors, refusing to respond to changes in reality will lead to destruction.  Reality will not tolerate it.  If a variable that allegedly mean-reverts refuses to revert over long periods of time, then we need to acknowledge the possibility that the variable is not naturally mean-reverting, or that the mean that it naturally reverts to has changed. Economics is not physics.  There are no “divinely-ordained” constants that govern the system.  The averages that economic variables exhibit, and the settling points towards which they gravitate, can and do change as secular conditions in economies change.  This fact is true of almost anything “economic” that we might measure–growth rates, interest rates, inflation rates, asset valuations, and profit margins.

Utilizing the data in NIPA Table 1.14 (FRED), we end up with the following chart, which is the only accurate NIPA chart of net profit margins for the macroeconomy, and the only NIPA chart that anyone should be citing in this debate.

npmdb1

 

 

Comments are closed.