Oil profit stuff
From Neal Bortz HERE WE GO WITH THE PROFIT HYSTERIA AGAIN
The Associated Press is reporting that Exxon Mobil’s second quarter profits totaled $10.36 billion. That’s the second largest quarterly profit ever recorded by any publicly traded U.S. company.
OK .. get ready for the screams. It’s just a matter of hours before some demagogues in Congress start yelling again for a windfall profits tax. Across the country we’re going to hear screams of anguish from economic ignoramuses who couldn’t tell you the difference from a profit and a profit margin.
Nowhere in the article can you find Exxon Mobil’s profit margin for the quarter. You can, though, find the numbers you can crunch to reach that figure. Total revenues for Exxon Mobil during the quarter were $99.03 billion. Run a little division problem and you come up with a 10.46% profit margin. Not bad at all, but not the best out there either. Most pharmaceutical and banking companies earned a higher profit margin.
The amount of profit earned is directly tied to the price of the product you are selling, and the market for that profit. All these higher profits mean is that the cost of Exxon Mobil’s products (primarily petroleum-based products) has gone up along with demand.
By the way ,,, during the quarter Exxon spent nearly $5 billion of this profit on capital projects and exploration for new sources of oil, and another $7,9 billion was s
ent to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. Belinda is one of those shareholders, so perhaps you can blame here for your high gas prices. Besides Belinda, we have some of teacher’s union pension funds out there who invest heavily in Exxon Mobil. These dividends, which came from the Exxon profits, will be spent to cover pension checks to retired teachers. Now that’s pretty nasty, isn’t it! How DARE these teachers receive pension checks funded by investments in a successful corporation like Exxon Mobil when the government could be getting that money thorough a windfall profits tax?
Sphere: Related Content
This entry was posted
on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 7:00 am and is filed under Evil Business Profiteers.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
![[Valid RSS]](http://politicalpartypoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
July 29th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
I try to explain all this to people when the subject comes up, but they seem to have a blind spot where this subject is concerned. It seems that they have to believe that these big bad oil companies are just plain evil, or they just aren’t happy in their misery. lol
July 29th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
Trinity this really boils down to basic common sense. I’m a poor black dude and it would be easy to blame ANY big bad company. Hell why not blame the cable company for making up pay for Cartoon Network, or the water folks for penalizing us for wanting our grass to stay green.
Or like the piece said, banks fuck us by charging ridiculous amounts of money for ATM withdrawals.
I watched a segment where this crazy bitch is complaining about the price of gas, while driving some huge Expedition and saying oil companies are ripping us off. Not getting the irony of the cameras getting a nice tight shot of this nice shiny vehicle she was driving.
People are just fucken clueless. This is a free country and people are entitled to their colossal ignorance.