The Big Business President: Corporate profits have soared under President Obama

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If You Like Corporations, You Should Like Obama

Public company corporate profits have nearly quadrupled under President Obama’s watch. That’s faster than at any time since World War II.

Obama doesn’t get much credit for this since these companies have been slow to hire and expand. The money has gone to corporate coffers and to shareholders as dividends and share buybacks. But the money is there.

This means stronger balance sheets that could keep the next wave of economic hard times from becoming another crisis. Plus, unemployment has gone down. There's been job growth in some industries, particularly in energy exploration and production. Does Obama deserve credit for this turnaround? You bet. These corporations made a lot of their money by cashing stimulus checks.

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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/barack-obamas-conservative-utopia

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Business executives like to portray the Obama administration as the “most anti-business” in history, creating an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation.” However, the data tells a far different story. According to a Bloomberg News analysis, corporate profits have grown by 171 percent under Obama, the most in the post-war era:

U.S. corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by 171 percent under Obama, more than under any president since World War II, and are now at their highest level relative to the size of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Profits are more than twice as high as their peak during President Ronald Reagan’s administration and more than 50 percent greater than during the late-1990s Internet boom, measured by the size of the economy.

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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/01/17/1461871/corporate-profits-anti-business-obama/

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Stagnant middle class pay and a yawning wealth gap have been the main obstacles to U.S. economic growth for the past three decades, especially the last 10 years, according to a new study by two economists at Washington University in St. Louis.

In mid-December, The Wall Street Journal ran a chart that explained why. It showed that 90 percent of American households suffered a 10 percent fall in income from 2002 to 2012, while the top one percent enjoyed sharp increases.

Common sense as well as Macroeconomics 101 tells you that if 270 million Americans earned less in 2012 than in 2002, they had less to spend. They had to cut back on consumption. That caused weaker consumer demand — a bad trend, because what economists call “aggregate consumer demand” is the engine of economic growth.

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http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/02/06/a-crash-course-in-growth-economics/

call it the "low wage recovery" or the "no corporation left behind recovery".

It has not been a recovery for the middle class or the poor.

Average annual corporate profit growth under Obama is the highest since 1900, whereas profit growth declined during both Bush presidencies. As a share of the economy, corporate profits have never been higher.