Profit rates (pretax profits divided by the value of fixed capital, both from the flow of funds accounts) for U.S. nonfinancial corporations, which recovered from their early 1980s lows (3-4%) and risen steadily into the mid-1990s, peaked in 1996 at 8.3%, and have fallen back to 7.5% in 1998. The recovered rate is/was no match for 1950s and early 1960s rates of 10-12%, but a doubling is nothing to be sneezed at. On a chart, the last few years look like the peak/rolling over in the profit rate around 1996, the year of the first post-WW II credit crunch and the apparent overripening of the Golden Age boom. Of course, this could just be a cyclical squiggle, and the profit rate (by these disgracefully bourgeois measures, I admit) will burst to new highs on a millennial upswing.
Doug