On Nov 26, 2007, at 5:16 PM, bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:
> Many seem to think that the present boom in profits, though coupled
> with
> anemic net investment in the US, cannot be accounted for by Marx's
> theory.
> Yet as I read Nicholas Véron, et al Smoke and Mirrors, Inc:
> Accounting for
> Capitalism it may well be that through financial acumen of the
> accountants
> we are getting deranged view of the success of the captains of
> industry.
The profits boom of the 1990s was revised down by the national income accountants during the annual benchmark revisions as they uncovered all the creative accounting. Still, the boom surived the revisions. I suspect we'll see something similar in coming years.
With productivity up and wages tightly compressed, why should it be surprising that profits rose?
Doug