Financial Cost (1): Overview of the data

This graph shows "percent change" rates for the data downloaded for my post of 12 November. Annual data, so the graph shows "percent change from prior year".

The first tall spike we come to, above 40%, between 1948 and 1952, that yucky blue line shows corporate profits. Corporate profits are pretty volatile: The line peaks repeatedly, both upward and downward, and this behavior is consistent for the whole 1948-2016 period shown on the graph.

That volatility is the reason I'm doing this follow-up to mine of the 12th. In that post I looked at corporate data for 1955 through 1958, a brief period during which the growth of profits began by increasing 26% over the previous year, and ended by falling 12% below the previous year.

Those growth rates suggest that corporate profits were well above trend in '55 and well below trend in '58. I wasn't thinking about that when I wrote the post. I was working with those years because those were the years Samuelson and Solow considered in particular in their 1960 paper.

The differences from trend no doubt exaggerated the movements of my "interest cost relative to profits" ratio, giving me the ten-point increase in interest cost (from 15% to 25%) relative to profits. So I'm thinking my numbers exaggerated the situation, perhaps significantly. That's why I'm taking another look.

After the yucky blue line, the red line stands out as also highly volatile. That's the interest cost. This one shows more variation than do profits, across the whole 1948-2016 period. The red line is pretty tame before the mid-1960s, staying generally between 10% and 20%. Then from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s the red peaks grow increasingly higher, and the down-pointing peaks increasingly lower. The growing volatility in this period likely reflects the inflation of the time. Finally, since the mid-1980s the red line seems to show some increase over time, but I'd say the main feature is that the movements here are very much bigger than those before the mid-1960s. They are about equal in size to movements during the 1970s and early '80s, but run lower: During the Great Inflation the red line didn't want to go below zero; since the mid-80s it has been centered on the zero level.

The next  line that catches my eye is the gold one, Corporate Gross Value Added (GVA). This line shows little volatility, little vertical motion. It's chief function on this graph seems to be to hide the other lines that display little volatility: nominal GDP (purple) and Employee Compensation (dark blue).

The one line so far omitted from my review of the graph is the greenish line, which shows the growth of GDP with inflation removed from the numbers. This line is mostly hidden by the gold line, except during the years from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Again, this is the time of the so-called Great Inflation so we should expect to see the green line run low in these years. And the fact that it does run low supports the view that the growing volatility of the red line in those years "reflects the inflation of the time.

Notice that the gold line and the lines that it hides show a hint of uptrend during the years of inflation. This isn't news. But I want to mention it now so that maybe I won't be fooled by it when I'm lost in the details of my analysis of the numbers.