The Evolution of U.S. Corporate Profits: Dissecting 70 Years’ of Performance
U.S. corporate profits have generally weathered the pandemic with resiliency. A key question for investors of all stripes—from equity to fixed income and beyond—is how corporate profits might proceed from here. Insight into this question relies on identifying the factors that influence corporate profitability. Our work finds five factors with statistical significance: corporate tax rates, real interest rates, debt-to-equity ratios, real dollar exchange rates, and real oil prices. These findings not only explain the relationships between these factors and corporate profits as a percent of GDP, but they also allow us to extrapolate how corporate profits may evolve in 2022 and 2023.