QUOTE(Thomas @ Jul 18 2003, 07:07 AM)
Is George Bush hurting Americas corporate giants?
The first thing I'd want to know is how real those losses are. CFOs love to turn real gains into paper losses so much that they take classes in how to do it. Let's assume, though, for the sake of argument, that the losses are real.
What Bush is doing is hurting consumers; if the corporations get hurt too, that's "collateral damage" (a Bush-administration specialty). Yeah, yeah, we got a minuscule tax cut/refund/whatever, but it's not near enough to make up for all the people who've become un- or under-employed or unavailable for work because they're doing something they weren't trained for in Iraq. Most people would rather have a decent job than night shift at Denny's plus a pittance of a tax cut. So the consumers suffer, and the pain spreads outward in circles from there. Three of the four companies you mention are in the inner circle, where almost all of their revenues come from products that end up unmodified in consumers' hands, and that's no coincidence.
I'm sure some pseudo-economist is itching to get in and say it's all a feedback loop, that the consumers are hurting because the companies can't afford to pay them. In real life, though, it's not one feedback loop but many that interlock, with delays involved, so at any given point in time it really is possible for one part of the loop to rise above or sag beneath the others. At
this particular point in time, it's the consumers feeling the pinch.