this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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When $98B revenue isn’t enough….
That's late-stage capitalism for you. Making a profit isn't enough. It has to be more profit than last year or your business is floundering.
Because if you’re not, you’re making less simply due to inflation.
You would need to make $108 Billion in profit this year to have the same relative profit as $98 Billion last year.
"Relative profit." Who gives a fuck? $1 more than costs is a profit. Be satisfied with that rather than unsustainable never-ending growth.
Accounting for inflation isn’t growth is the point.
If you’re not making more, you’re making less simply due to that.
It’s real easy to say “just be satisfied with it” when you’re talking about a private company, but for a publicly traded company you’re fucking over millions of people with retirement accounts if you’re not keeping up with inflation.
Are you claiming that if Google only made $50 billion this year it would go under? That it wouldn't be able to pay its employees? What exactly happens if they make less profit than they did last year?
Gamblers lose money due to emotions.
What happens if they make less profit? Their stock goes down which affects millions of 401ks that are invested in the market.
Sounds like maybe we should go back to pensions, which don't rely on the investor class.
How do you think pensions were set up?
The company holding the pension just invested in the market themselves instead of you getting to choose what to invest in yourself, and you lost all of that investment if you left the company before 20 years. There were more strict requirements for what they could invest in, and they had to be much lower risk than what an individual is allowed to invest their own money into. You still had issues with if the stock market tanked, pension funds would be affected.
Talk about people being tied to an employer over health insurance being terrible, you would lose your entire retirement if you left a company.
If you want to talk about a nationwide public pension system, that’s basically what social security is. And guess what, it’s invested in the market too. It’s one of the single largest holders of US bonds. Same with every other government pension system.
The bond market is not the stock market. You're being disingenuous now.
It’s not as volatile, as the stock market, but bonds are still traded the same way and are still risky in certain cases.
Just as an example, Silicon Valley bank failed because they were invested heavily into bonds because they’re “safe” and when the Fed changed rates, they couldn’t liquidate their bonds quick enough to pay out their obligations because nobody wanted to buy the lower interest bonds they held when newer bonds were higher interest.
You can end up in cases where a pension fund can’t liquidate their bonds to make regular payouts during times like now when the Fed is increasing rates to combat inflation.
All investments are risky. With a pension, you’re trusting a company you work for to manage that risk for you in exchange for it being all or nothing based on if you stay there long enough.
With a 401k, you can manage your own risk level yourself. If you want to put it all into bonds, you can do that.
Please explain how GM not making as much profit this year because they are paying their workers more affects the bond market. Because you seem to have forgotten that's what we're talking about.
$98B in one quarter!