Corporate Profits: The Growth of Finance

EDIT 16 March 2020
There is a problem with this post: My analysis examines the financial and nonfinancial components of "corporate business profits" as portions of "corporate profits". I now think I should have shown them as portions of "corporate business profits", to exclude something which must be considered "corporate non-business profits" though I still have no idea what that might be: the profits of "non-profit" corporations, maybe?

This post needs to be revised, and I hope to revise it soon. In the meanwhile please understand that it is incorrect as it stands.

See also: Arthurian Profit Study 1.0
End of edit.



Corporate profits after tax, from FRED (as before):

Graph #1

The blue line is total corporate profits after tax, as above. The red line is the total for "nonfinancial" corporate business, the productive subset of corporations.

Graph #2

Showing the growth of financial-sector profit as a percent of total corporate profit:

Graph #3

Finally, comparing corporate profit of the financial sector to that of the "nonfinancial" or productive sector:

Graph #4

Here, the down-sloping blue line indicates the profits of productive (or "nonfinancial") corporations as a share of total corporate profit. The red, up-sloping line indicates the share accruing to the financial sector.

Over the past 60 years, financial sector profits have grown from about 10% of total corporate profits to almost half.