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Corporate earnings: up. Hiring: not so much.

Mitchell Hartman Aug 8, 2014
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Corporate earnings: up. Hiring: not so much.

Mitchell Hartman Aug 8, 2014
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Corporate earnings reports for the spring quarter are mostly in by the first week in August. Overall, they paint a pretty rosy picture for America, Inc., as Bloomberg predicts profits at S&P 500 companies rose nearly 9.5 percent; sales rose more than 4 percent. So far, 75 percent of companies that have reported earned more than equity analysts predicted.

“The results have been really solid,” said chief economic strategist John Canally at LPL Financial in Boston. He said the results bode well for the second half of 2014, especially since GDP growth has picked up since the winter reversal.

Canally said companies are mostly plowing their profits back into the company; not adding to their payrolls, or investing in new plant and equipment.

“It’s mergers and acquisitions, increasing dividends, share buybacks,” Canally said. “Companies are doing what companies normally do: trying to boost share price for their shareholders. They’re just not doing a lot of hiring right now.”

Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, said U.S. companies have increasing worries overseas — where a lot of their profits are earned — due to geopolitical and economic crises in Russia-Ukraine, Iraq-Syria, Israel-Palestine, Argentina, and Europe.

“Some of those geopolitical events have made people rethink how optimistic they are about the world economy over the next 12 months,” said Ashworth  Which, he said, explains some of the stock market’s recent slump.

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