Chart of the Day: Corporate Earnings

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Via Paul Kedrosky, here’s a McKinsey chart comparing projections of corporate earnings by Wall Street analyst with the actual results. As you can see, the analysts relentlessly overestimate earnings.

Actually, what I find most interesting about this chart isn’t the overestimation — though that’s fascinating — but the remarkable steadiness of their earnings projections. For 25 years, with the exception of a few years starting in the late 90s, through good times and bad, consensus earnings for the S&P 500 have been right around 12-13%. No matter what’s going on in the broader economy, Wall Street always thinks earning will be at least 12% or higher. Coincidentally, I’m sure, this is also the direction of error most likely to get their clients to churn stocks.

Anyway, it’s nice work if you can get it. If any Wall Street firm wants to hire me, I’ll be happy to project 13% earnings forever and then make up good stories to justify it. I think I’d be good at it. And my services probably come cheaper than the analysts they’re using now. Any takers?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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