The Earnings Boom Isn’t Just About Lower Taxes

In the first quarter of this year, after-tax U.S. corporate profits as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis went up a lot (at an 8.2 percent annualized rate over the previous quarter), but pretax profits only went up a little (1.2 percent). That raised questions of whether all those great first-quarter earnings reports were mainly just the result of a one-time boost from the big corporate tax cut Congress passed in December. A lot of solid second-quarter earnings reports seemed to indicate that there was more to it than just tax cuts, and today we have the official if far from final1answer from the BEA: Corporate profits are on a genuine roll.

The corporate tax bill even went up a bit in the second quarter, with pretax profits rising at a 3.3 percent annualized pace and after-tax profits at 2.4 percent. This is good news for the economic outlook — downturns and slowdowns are often preceded by dips in corporate profits — and also a sign that the corporate part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may to at least a modest extent be delivering as advertised. A lot has been written about the corporate tax cuts’ failure to boost wages, which is fair given that the White House Council of Economic Advisers did promise a $4,000-per-household pay hike, but a bit premature. The tax cuts do, however, already seem to be delivering or at least coinciding with an increase in corporate profits and investment.

A longer-term view of corporate profits tells another interesting story: