Corporate Profits Way Up in 2nd Quarter – Another Reason Why Wall Street is Anti-Obama

No, Doesn’t Make Sense to The Dismal Political Economist Either

With the second quarter of 2011 now history, economic reports are starting to come in. Expectations are not optimistic.  If one needed to describe the economy in one word, that word would be “stagnant”.

So there should be some celebration on Wall Street as the report comes out that the profits of firms in the S&P 500 Stock Index are expected to be up 13.6% over the same quarter in 2010.  The headline in the Wall Street Journal describes things nicely

Profits Thrive in Weak Recovery

Combined earnings of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are projected to rise 13.6% from a year ago for the second quarter, according to an analysis of Wall Street forecasts by Brown Brothers Harriman.

So why isn’t Wall Street overjoyed with the Obama Presidency?  Well for one thing he hasn’t said a whole lot of nice things about them, and he hasn’t had them to lunch as often as he should and he certainly hasn’t praised their job cutting actions, which were certainly a part of their improved profit picture.

So the message to the President sounds like “Yeah, we are making a lot of money under your policies but we would rather have the other guys back in power, the ones that allowed us to so mismanage our business that it took a massive federal bailout to save many financial institutions”.

Yep, that must be it.