[lbo-talk] spiked-essays | Zombie anti-imperialists vs the'Empire'by James Heartfield

[Dennis Redmond]

> Not persistently - in the U.S., there was a secular rise from 1982,
> with lots of cyclical variation. Profit rates in the EU are pretty
> high too, as far as I know.

I was updating some of my European company data - who knows when I'll be
finished, I've got far too many other things to do these days - but EU
profits are way, *way* up. Pretax profits for the major Eurobanking groups
went from 65 billion EUR in 2001 to 98 billion in 2003; on my much
sketchier matrix of non-financial EU firms (I'm still missing a few large
firms), pretax profits went from 40 billion in 2002 to 97 billion in 2003,
and have continued to climb.

Japanese profit rates also seem to be recovering strongly.

-- DRR