Financial Cost (2): Inspection

I want to use GVA (gross value added) as the context for profits and interest expense. Better than GDP in this case, I think, because the GVA I'm using is "Gross value added of corporate business". The Financial Times lexicon says

GDP is commonly estimated using one of three theoretical approaches: production, income or expenditure. When using production or income approaches, the contribution to an economy of a particular industry or sector is measured using GVA.

So the GVA number I'm using measures the part of GDP produced by corporate business. I think that's a good context number for corporate profits and corporate interest expense.

The data I downloaded for mine of the 12th (the data I'm using here) includes GDP and RGDP. (From these I can get price deflator values if needed.) Also: interest paid and compensation of employees for "domestic corporate business"; GVA for "corporate business"; and "corporate" profits. I'm pretty sure these data series (except GDP and RGDP) are all numbers for "domestic corporate business", but I don't know for sure. If you know something I don't, let me know.


First graph shows employee compensation, monetary interest paid, and corporate profit, each as a percent of corporate GVA:

Graph #1:

I should say right away that "monetary interest paid" is not a component of corporate GVA. It is a measure of all the interest expense of corporations, or gross interest. Only "net" interest is included in GVA. The reason for this, no doubt, is to avoid "double counting" of income. But cost is cost, so I'm looking at the bigger number. More on this later.

Employee compensation (blue) as a share of corporate GVA runs pretty stable (more stable than Labor Share, which seems to show decline since 1960), running above 60% until the year 2000, when it starts to drop.

Corporate profits (green) decline from about 25% of corporate GVA to just over 10%. They run low in the Reagan years (interesting!) but pick up a bit in the latter 1990s, then start rising just as labor share starts to drop. Profits are now running above 20% again.

Total corporate Interest paid (red) is shown as a percent of GVA for purposes of comparison. Interest starts out low, less than 2.5% of corporate GVA, but rises to 10% by 1970. It peaks at 27.4% of GVA in 1982, runs high while corporate profits run low (the Reagan years), and peaks at 28.5% in 1989. Thereafter, the trend is slowly downward, but with increasing volatility.

It appears that interest gained at the expense of profits in the 1980s, and that after 2000 profits gained on employee compensation ("labor"). For what that's worth.


To see the relative changes in the three series on the first graph, I divided each series by its 1947 value so all three series start with the value 1.0:

Graph #2:

Indexing the values that way really magnifies the "interest paid" numbers, because that data starts at such a low level. And because employee compensation was so high on the first graph and shows relatively little change, the variation in that series is reduced to almost nothing; here, the blue line is almost straight. The green line, not so high on the first graph and varying more than the blue, still shows some variation on the second graph.

The first graph emphasized the different sizes of the three data series. The second emphasizes the changes in size. The red line really stands out here, but the extreme flatness of the blue is equally noteworthy.


I took profits and employee compensation from Graph #1, and subtracted them from total corporate GVA to see how much of GVA remains for other corporate spending. That's the blue line here:

Graph #3:

I put the red line from Graph #1 on this graph for comparison. It starts significantly lower than the blue line, but catches up by around 1980, and doesn't drop off much after that.

"Interest paid" is a big number. Big, and mostly unnecessary.