Friday, September 21, 2018

Those Soaring Corporate Profits

These are boom times for American corporations. The Commerce Department said this week that after-tax profits across the U.S. rose 16.1 percent in the quarter ended June 30 from a year earlier. That's the largest year-over-year gain in six years.

Lower taxes were a big driver of this. Because of the lower corporate tax rate signed into law last year, taxes paid by U.S. companies in the quarter were down 33 percent from a year earlier, according to the government data, or more than $100 billion at an annual rate.

Strong economic growth also played a role. The Commerce Department recently revised upward its estimate of how fast the U.S. economy grew in the second quarter, to an annual rate of 4.2 percent from an earlier estimate of 4.1 percent.

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