Profit Margins Quotes

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers-- booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one-- the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it-- along with first dibs on the new books.

The Internet is transient. Information can be removed with a couple of mouse-clicks; it is an Orwellian dream. We have been advised, by people who claim to know about these things, that there is no point in protesting against a social network. Whoever owns the network will run it as they see fit, normally to maximize their profit margin. Members who dispute the rules will simply be thrown out. The Terms of Use are written so as not to allow them any recourse.

Yeah, well, your people happen to be soul-sucking demons. (Wulf) You ever met a banker or a lawyer? Tell me who’s worse, my Urian or one of them? At least we need the food; they do it just for profit margins. (Phoebe)

Truly, nothing is better than to crush your competition, to drive down their profit margins, to hear the lamentations of their sales representatives.

Profit is good. Profit motivates businesses to be: (a) efficient - to do more with less, to consume fewer resources, to reduce and reuse waste. (b) productive - to allow for bigger profit margins. (c) Valuable - income, and therefore profit is only possible when we add value to our customers lives. When the value of our product or service is worth more to them than what it cost us to provide it, we profit.

If you want your business to be resilient, you gotta improve cash flow and widen margins.

Profit is good. Profit compells people to be: (a) efficient - to do more with less, to consume fewer resources, to reduce and reuse waste. (b) productive - to allow for bigger profit margins. (c) Valuable - income, and therefore profit is only possible when we add value to our customers lives. When the value of our product or service is worth more to them than what it cost us to provide it, we profit. And there’s no scarcity of possible profits. Every business should be profiting. When every business is profiting, that’s a lot of increased value going around.

Margins matter in business. If a business has $1,000,000 dollars in revenues but $1.5 million in expenses, the business is heading for self destruction due to a liquidity problem. Meanwhile, if another business only has $100,000 in revenues and $50,000 in expenses, it’s doing better than the first business even though it has less revenues. And a business with $60,000 in revenues but only $2,000 in expenses technically has a greater margin than both of the other businesses. Revenues are very important, but the key is to both maximize revenues and minimize expenses so that you have the widest profit margin possible.

Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered.

The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.

No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one—the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it—along with first dibs on the new books.

Legions of men, butchered for the greater glory and the profit margins of bankers, chancellors, generals, stockbrokers, and other fathers of the nation, had been maimed and ruined for life in the name of freedom, democracy, the Empire, the race, or the flag…. Take your pick.

First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies.

The smallest multicorp killed more people than all the sex killers who ever lived, for a fucking profit margin—and the WTO gave them awards for it.

When profit margins of a whole industry rise because of repeated price increases, the indication is not a good one for the long-range investor.

So one way to create an attractive risk/reward situation is to limit downside risk severely by investing in situations that have a large margin of safety. The upside, while still difficult to quantify, will usually take care of itself. In other words, look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don’t lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones.

If you have to constantly reinvest the business profits back into the business just to keep the business going, then your business has a major cash flow problem. If your business has thin margins like that, it is incapable of resilience. If you want your business to be resilient, you gotta improve cash flow and widen margins.

If your business asset has expenses that are directly correlated to revenues and they take up a big percentage of revenues, and you determine that it is not possible or practical to reduce the expenses or increase the associated revenues for that asset - you have two options: If in totality the assets revenues are greater than its expenses, keep the asset and do not get rid of it. Small profit margins are better than no profit margins and this asset is adding value to your business’s portfolio. If the assets expenses are greater than its revenues, then it is actually not an asset and any decisions made about it should be made with this realization in mind.

It was the kind of thing brands had started posting recently, as if they were moral entities instead of capitalist enterprises, as if they had values beyond customer retention and profit margin. We’d come to expect this from them—they were now our legislators, our educators, and, most importantly, our friends. As people began to think of themselves more and more as brands, brands started to feel more and more like people.

Graham figured that always using the margin of safety principle when deciding whether to purchase shares of a business from a crazy partner like Mr. Market was the secret to making safe and reliable investment profits.

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers—booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one—the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it—along with first dibs on the new books.

Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It’s the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it.

As a predatory competition for hoarding profit, neoliberalism produces massive inequality in wealth and income, shifts political power to financial elites, destroys all vestiges of the social contract, and increasingly views “unproductive” sectors—most often those marginalized by race, class, disability, resident status, and age—as suspicious, potentially criminal, and ultimately disposable. It thus criminalizes social problems and manufactures profit by commercializing surveillance, policing, and prisons.

New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private, for-profit health care "soulless vampire bastards making money off human pain." Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything. It wasn't that long ago when a kid in America broke his leg, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun stuck a thermometer in his ass, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle, and you were done. The bill was $1.50; plus, you got to keep the thermometer. But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some bean counter decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. The more people who get sick, and stay sick, the higher their profit margins, which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O. Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries were they live longer than us? Oh, it's hardly worth it, they may live longer, but they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom. The problem with President Obama's health-care plan isn't socialism. It's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And it's not just medicine--prisons also used to be a nonprofit business, and for good reason--who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition, you're going to have trouble with the tenants. It's not a coincidence that we outsourced running prisons to private corporations and then the number of prisoners in America skyrocketed. There used to be some things we just didn't do for money. Did you know, for example, there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? FDR said he didn't want World War II to create one millionaire, but I'm guessing Iraq has made more than a few executives at Halliburton into millionaires. Halliburton sold soldiers soda for $7.50 a can. They were honoring 9/11 by charging like 7-Eleven. Which is wrong. We're Americans; we don't fight wars for money. We fight them for oil. And my final example of the profit motive screwing something up that used to be good when it was nonprofit: TV news. I heard all the news anchors this week talk about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. And I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.

Medicare, which pays hospitals based on their costs, plus overhead and a small profit margin, for providing each service, would have paid about $825 for all three tests. Also

If you’re going to put as little as possible into my training and wages, if you’re going to make sure that I can’t get enough hours to survive in order to avoid giving me health care, and generally make sure that I’m as uncomfortable as possible at any given time just to make sure I know my place, then how can you expect me to care about your profit margin? Remember, you get what you pay for.

When you start with people and create products for them, you become a price setter, not a price follower. That gives you better profit margins. And you get repeat customers, rather than one-off sales.

To have a man whose name is on the label showing such interest, commitment, and determination for the best is a wonderful thing. This is someone who will throw money at quality, who believes in being the best. Never knock it. Would you prefer to have a bean counter in corporate headquarters, someone who never comes near the brewery, making decisions solely on the basis of the bottom line and profit margins?

Buy books, then, that you have read with profit and pleasure and hope to read and reread. Buy books that you may underscore passages and write upon the margins, thus assuring yourself that the book is your own. Keep the books that mean the most to you close at hand, one or two, if possible, on a table at your bedside. Do not hide away your favorite books or keep them locked in enclosed shelves. Do not keep them under glass.

It was the explosion of EDM music where profit margins were exponentially higher because the entire under-aged clientele arrived totally fucked up on pills and needed to stay hydrated at the price of $7 per bottle for water.

You love them. The fives and twenties and the profit margins, overheads, the trading fees and tax-free fuckwhats.” “I love little more than a tax-free fuckwhat.” “How does anybody keep track of money anyway, when it’s zinging around all over the place? This guy puts it here for five minutes into pork asses, then whap! he kicks the asses and slaps it into gizmos, then shuffles some of that into peanut brittle.” “It’s never wise to put all your eggs into one pork’s ass.

Six Telltale Signs of a Winning Strategy 1) An activity system that looks different from any competitor's system. It means you are tempting to deliver value in a distinctive way. 2) Customers who absolutely adore you, and noncustomers who can't see why anybody would buy from you. This means you have been choiceful. 3) Competitors who make a good profit doing what they are doing. It means your strategy has left where-to-play and how-to-win choices for competitors, who don't need to attack the heart of your market to survive. 4) More resources to spend on an ongoing basis than competitors have. This means you are winning the value equation and have the biggest margin between price and costs and best capacity to add spending to take advantage of an opportunity to defend your turf. 5) Competitors who attack one another, not you. It means that you look like the hardest target in the (broadly defined) industry to attack. 6) Customers who look first to you for innovations, new products, and service enhancement to make their lives better. This means that your customers believe that you are uniquely positioned to create value for them.

Profits are the result of productivity. Productivity is defined as ‘the effectiveness of effort as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.’ Profit exists within this margin. Therefore, any desire to increase profits must include reasonable actions to improve productivity.

We have shown two important and related sets of facts. In most US industries, market shares have become more concentrated and more persistent. Industry leaders are less likely to be challenged and replaced than they were twenty years ago. At the same time, their profit margins have increased.

The scene would give white people a chance to see themselves as complicit in cultural appropriation, but the takeaway for marginalized audiences would be different. It could tell them, "You're not crazy. Your physical and intellectual labor really has been stolen and repackaged for profit. It's real.

In an exchange economy everybody’s money income is somebody else’s cost. Every increase in hourly wages, unless or until compensated by an equal increase in hourly productivity, is an increase in costs of production. An increase in costs of production, where the government controls prices and forbids any price increase, takes the profit from marginal producers, forces them out of business, means a shrinkage in production and a growth in unemployment. Even where a price increase is possible, the higher price discourages buyers, shrinks the market, and also leads to unemployment. If a 30 percent increase in hourly wages all around the circle forces a 30 percent increase in prices, labor can buy no more of the product than it could at the beginning; and the merry-go-round must start all over again.

In business, it's very important to protect your businesses income! Because a business with no income is not really a business at all. As long as the business has income - even if margins are slim, you can find a way to cut expenses, improve cash flow and improve it's profitability. Tight cash flow can be better leveraged than no cash flow. But if you make choices that jeopardize or forefeit the income, because you're frustrated with slim margins, then you forfeit that opportunity. Work with those slim margins while you work on widening them.

the first businesses in the United States to implement Owen’s 8-hour day was the Ford Motor Company. In 1914, it not only cut the standard workday to eight hours, but it also doubled its workers’ pay in the process. To the shock of many at the time, this resulted in a significant increase in productivity, and Ford’s profit margins doubled within two years of implementation.

There is a kinship, between the climate scientists and the epidemiologists and the scholars of authoritarian states. The people who research worst-case scenarios are stuck breaking bad news while protectors of profit margins and purveyors of institutionalist mythologies market false assurances. The later remain successful not in spite of evidence, but to spite the evidence.

The value of a company selling a trendy product, such as television shopping, depends on the profitability of the product, the product life cycle, competitive barriers, and the ability of the company to replicate its current success. Investors are often overly optimistic about the sustainability of a trend, the ultimate degree of market penetration, and the size of profit margins.

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known---cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honored of them all--- And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end. To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains; but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, my own Telemachus, To whom I leave the scepter and the isle--- Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill This labor, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and through soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me--- That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads---you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are--- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class. A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan. A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them. And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way. But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.

He asks, “how hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay, and Google?”33 Wu is putting his finger on a disquieting new reality—that the new communication medium a younger generation gravitated to because of its promise of openness, transparency, and deep social collaboration masks another persona more concerned with ringing up profit by advancing a networked Commons.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business a few years later. “We didn’t want to be Kodak.” The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn’t bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.

Ownership shatters ecology. For the land to survive, for us to survive, it must cease to be property. It cannot continue to sustain us for much longer under the weight of such merciless use. We know this. We know the insatiable hunger for profit that drives that use and the dismpowerment that accommodates us. We don't yet know how to make it stop. But where ecology meets culture there is another question. How do we hold in common not only the land, but all the fragile, tenacious rootedness of human beings to the ground of our histories, teh cultural residues of our daily work, the invidual and tribal longings for place? How do we abolish ownership of land and respect people's ties to it? How do we shift the weight of our times from the single-minded nationalist drive for a piece of territory and the increasingly barricaded self-interest of even the marginally privileged towards a rich and multilayered sense of collective heritage? I don't have the answer. But I know that only when we can hold each people's particular memories and connections with land as a common treasure can the knowledge of our place on it be restored.

It seems wrong to call it "business". It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher–and none of us wavered in the belief that "stakes" didn't mean "money". For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for use business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It's a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living–and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great business do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the life of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is–you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping other to live more fully, and if that's business, all right, call me a businessman.

But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance)—competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.

You know what—gyms make the largest chunk of their profit from clients who pay their monthly dues on auto-pay but never bother to show up and use the gym. The DVD-rental companies make a good chunk of their profits from late fees; the credit-card companies make a fortune on sundry fines and penalties; the airlines’ margins are highest on ticket changes and cancellations… So, the key to running a successful business in America is to sign up a customer and pray he’ll somehow screw up…

In a world where truth is “what works for you,” the fool who proposes that truth is objective will seem as laughable as Cyrano with his rubber nose. In an age where beauty is a skeletal slattern, a pornographic picture, or a butch biker with tattoos, the one who believes in the frail beauty of Belle or Beatrice or the Blessed Virgin is an amusing and archaic knight. In a world where the bottom line is the profit margin, one who seeks the top line of honesty and honor will seem like a ridiculous Don Quixote.

Forget the contracting end,” says Jocelyn. “It’s a sideshow. The main deal is the prison. Prisons used to be about punishment, and then reform and penitence, and then keeping dangerous offenders inside. Then, for quite a few decades, they were about crowd control – penning up the young, aggressive, marginalized guys to keep them off the streets. And then, when they started to be run as private businesses, they were about the profit margins for the prepackaged jail-meal suppliers, and the hired guards and so forth.” Stan nods; he understands all of this.

One of the first things I look for in an industry is scalability. I want to be able to envision how I’ll take a business from a few million dollars to tens of billions of dollars. What will be the path to do that, and how fast can we move along that path? Is the industry growing much faster than GDP so that we’ll probably generate top-line growth each year just by showing up and can build from there? What’s the base price/volume combination we need to be profitable, and how realistic is it to significantly increase our profit margin over time? What could prevent us from doing that?

The rich and powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real―and they're getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there's a fair possibility―certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it―that within a couple hundred years the world's water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed.

The hearts of many on the Right are in cutting marginal tax rates and eliminating the capital gains tax. Good causes to be sure. But what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his country? Is whether the GDP rises at 2 or 3 or 4 percent as important as whether or not Western civilization endures and we remain one nation under God and one people? With the collapsing birthrate, open borders, and the triumph of an anti-Western multiculturalism, that is what is at issue today — the survival of America as a nation, separate and unique, and of Western civilization itself — and too many conservatives have gone AWOL in the last great fight of our lives.

First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies. By and large, a disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market. Hence, most companies with a practiced discipline of listening to their best customers and identifying new products that promise greater profitability and growth are rarely able to build a case for investing in disruptive technologies until it is too late.

the marginal notes to the Geneva Bible did more than provide theological elucidation at points of difficulty—the “most profitable annotations upon the hard places” mentioned on the title page of the work. They offered political comments on the text, which could easily be applied to the political situation under James I—and James cordially detested what he found in those notes.

Them, too, but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money—actually, that’s the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I’m not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it’s not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It’s actually irresponsible: you’re not a good member of society, you’re being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car.” “But if anyone asks for a raise,” I said, whapping the ice tray, “they’re being very very naughty to threaten their employer’s profit margin, after everything he’s done for the economy.” “Exactly. If you’re not rich, you’re a lesser being who shouldn’t have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.

Them, too, but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money - actually, that's the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I'm not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it's not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It's actually irresponsible: you're not a good member of society, you're being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car." "But if anyone asks for a raise," I said, whapping the ice tray, "they're being very very naughty to threaten their employer's profit margin, after everything he's done for the economy." "Exactly. If you're not rich, you're a lesser being who shouldn't have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.

By “good profit,” I don’t mean high margins or high return on capital, or lots of profit by just any means. What I consider to be good profit comes from Principled Entrepreneurship™—creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. Good profit comes from making a contribution in society—not from corporate welfare or other ways of taking advantage of people.

Our steady resistance forms cracks in the world of profit margins. It transitions us away from self-destruction. We are a thorn in the side of a world that believes it must extract to exist, a bone-deep reminder there are other ways of being…Some of us leave the land to bring our case to the financiers of the industry we oppose, to present the data and oppositional testimony the banks ostensibly have no knowledge of. In here, I feel like an exotic bird to be examined for potential danger. In here, alongside discussion of financial investments, I remind corporate heads that they drink water and breathe air. As awkward as it can be to remind a person of their own humanity, it has proven exceedingly effective to bring Indigenous rights and the voice of the land into these spaces. SACRED RESISTANCE by Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe, Couchiching First Nation

Around this time, McDonald’s had conceived of a new product, the Chicken McNugget, but they were reluctant to bring it to market because of their concern that chicken prices might rise and squeeze their profit margins. Chicken producers like Lane wouldn’t agree to sell to them at a fixed price because they were worried that their costs would go up and they would be squeezed. As I thought about the problem, it occurred to me that in economic terms a chicken can be seen as a simple machine consisting of a chick plus its feed. The most volatile cost that the chicken producer needed to worry about was feed prices. I showed Lane how to use a mix of corn and soymeal futures to lock in costs so they could quote a fixed price to McDonald’s. Having greatly reduced its price risk, McDonald’s introduced the McNugget in 1983. I felt great about helping make that happen.

Throughout the U.S., small farms are being squeezed out by large farms, the only ones able to survive on shrinking profit margins by economies of scale. But in southwestern Montana it is now impossible for small farmers to become large farmers by buying more land, for reasons succinctly explained by Allen Bjergo: “Agriculture in the U.S. is shifting to areas like Iowa and Nebraska, where no one would live for the fun of it because it isn’t beautiful as in Montana! Here in Montana, people do want to live for the fun of it, and so they are willing to pay much more for land than agriculture on the land would support. The Bitterroot is becoming a horse valley. Horses are economic because, whereas prices for agricultural products depend on the value of the food itself and are not unlimited, many people are willing to spend anything for horses that yield no economic benefit.

By probing questions such as these, the Swiss watch company Swatch, for example, was able to arrive at a cost structure some 30 percent lower than any other watch company in the world. At the start, Nicolas Hayek, chairman of Swatch, set up a project team to determine the strategic price for the Swatch. At the time, cheap (about $75), high-precision quartz watches from Japan and Hong Kong were capturing the mass market. Swatch set the price at $40, a price at which people could buy multiple Swatches as fashion accessories. The low price left no profit margin for Japanese or Hong Kong–based companies to copy Swatch and undercut its price. Directed to sell the Swatch for that price and not a penny more, the Swatch project team worked backwards to arrive at the target cost, a process that involved determining the margin Swatch needed to support marketing and services and earn a profit. Given

Microsoft’s success represented an aesthetic flaw in the way the universe worked. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he later said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”116 The primary reason for Microsoft’s success was that it was willing and eager to license its operating system to any hardware maker. Apple, by contrast, opted for an integrated approach. Its hardware came only with its software and vice versa. Jobs was an artist, a perfectionist, and thus a control freak who wanted to be in charge of the user experience from beginning to end. Apple’s approach led to more beautiful products, a higher profit margin, and a more sublime user experience. Microsoft’s approach led to a wider choice of hardware.

On 3 timeless ideas for investing Benjamin Graham, three fundamentally basic ideas: 1. You should look at stocks as part of ownership of a business. 2. You should look at market fluctuations in terms of his "Mr. Market" example & make them your friend rather than your enemy by essentially profiting from folly rather participating in it, & finally, 3. The 3 most important words in investing are "margin of safety" - ...always building a 15,000 pound bridge if you're going to be driving 10,000 pound truck across it...

In fact, as these companies offered more and more (simply because they could), they found that demand actually followed supply. The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. Whether it was latent demand for niche goods that was already there or a creation of new demand, we don't yet know. But what we do know is that the companies for which we have the most complete data - netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody - sales of products not offered by their bricks-and-mortar competitors amounted to between a quarter and nearly half of total revenues - and that percentage is rising each year. in other words, the fastest-growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren't available in traditional, physical retail stores at all. These infinite-shelf-space businesses have effectively learned a lesson in new math: A very, very big number (the products in the Tail) multiplied by a relatives small number (the sales of each) is still equal to a very, very big number. And, again, that very, very big number is only getting bigger. What's more, these millions of fringe sales are an efficient, cost-effective business. With no shelf space to pay for - and in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees - a niche product sold is just another sale, with the same (or better) margins as a hit. For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

It is challenging to honor the descent in a culture that primary values the ascent. We like things rising—stock markets, the GDP, profit margins. We get anxious when things go down. Even within psychology, there is a premise that is biased toward improvement, always getting better, rising above our troubles. We hold dear concepts like progress and integration. These are fine in and of themselves, but it is not the way psyche works. Psyche, we must remember, was shaped by and is rooted in the foundations of nature. As such, psyche also experiences times of decay and death, of stopping, regression, and being still. Much happens in these times that deepen the soul. When all we are shown is the imagery of ascent, we are left to interpret the times of descent as pathological; we feel that we are somehow failing. As poet and author Robert Bly wryly noted, “How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means ‘no ashes.’ 

Other groups of color need to acknowledge the courage of Black America, and our indebtedness to them for what we have learned from their struggles. Although all groups can recount their own unique struggles for equal rights, African Americans have always been in the forefront in advocating for social justice. Many other groups of color (and other marginalized groups—women and LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer] individuals) have learned much from the Black movement, including the importance of group identity, and have profited from the work, struggle, and sacrifice of African American brothers and sisters.

But privatisation has another important function in the neoliberal world view, and that's to assist wage suppression. If you're a private company, you've got one overriding obligation, and it's not to your workers, to your country or your community - it's to make a profit, in order to return it in dividends to your shareholders. That's it. And the means to increase that rate of return to its greatest possible margin is cutting the cost of your operation. You do this by increasing your productivity, expanding your market, raising prices on your offered commodities, and by reducing the wages and conditions of the people who work for you.

Data sliced sufficiently finely begin once again to tell stories. The top 1 percent of the income distribution—representing household incomes in excess of roughly $475,000—comprises only about 1.5 million households. If one adds up the numbers of vice presidents or above at S&P 1500 companies (perhaps 250,000), professionals in the finance sector, including in hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and mutual funds (perhaps 250,000), professionals working at the top five management consultancies (roughly 60,000), partners at law firms whose profits per partner exceed $400,000 (roughly 25,000), and specialist doctors (roughly 500,000), this yields perhaps 1 million people. These are surely not all one-percenters, but they are all plausibly parts of the top 1 percent, and this group might comprise half—a sizable share—of 1 percent households overall. At the very least, the people in these known and named jobs constitute a material, rather than just marginal or eccentric, part of the top 1 percent of the income distribution. They are also, of course, the people depicted in journalistic accounts of extreme jobs—the people who regularly cancel vacation plans, spend most of their time on the road, live in unfurnished luxury apartments, and generally subsume themselves in work, encountering their personal lives only occasionally, and as strangers.

This resulted in a model of the macroeconomy as consisting of a single consumer, who lives for ever, consuming the output of the economy, which is a single good produced in a single firm, which he owns and in which he is the only employee, which pays him both profits equivalent to the marginal product of capital and a wage equivalent to the marginal product of labor, to which he decides how much labor to supply by solving a utility function that maximizes his utility over an infinite time horizon, which he rationally expects and therefore correctly predicts. The economy would always be in equilibrium except for the impact of unexpected ‘technology shocks’ that change the firm’s productive capabilities (or his consumption preferences) and thus temporarily cause the single capitalist/worker/consumer to alter his working hours. Any reduction in working hours is a voluntary act, so the representative agent is never involuntarily unemployed, he’s just taking more leisure. And there are no banks, no debt, and indeed no money in this model. You think I’m joking? I wish I was.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

Lifting a goblet of wine to her lips, Evie glanced at him over the rim as she drank. “What is in that ledger?” “A lesson in creative record keeping. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Egan has been draining the club’s accounts. He shaves away increments here and there, in small enough quantities that the thefts have gone unnoticed. But over time, it totals up to a considerable sum. God knows how many years he’s been doing it. So far, every account book I’ve looked at contains deliberate inaccuracies.” “How can you be certain that they’re deliberate?” “There is a clear pattern.” He flipped open a ledger and nudged it over to her. “The club made a profit of approximately twenty thousand pounds last Tuesday. If you cross-check the numbers with the record of loans, bank deposits, and cash outlays, you’ll see the discrepancies.” Evie followed the trail of his finger as he ran it along the notes he had made in the margin. “You see?” he murmured. “These are what the proper amounts should be. He’s padded the expenses liberally. The cost of ivory dice, for example. Even allowing for the fact that the dice are only used for one night and then never again, the annual charge should be no more than two thousand pounds, according to Rohan.” The practice of using fresh dice every night was standard for any gaming club, to ward off any question that they might be loaded. “But here it says that almost three thousand pounds was spent on dice,” Evie murmured. “Exactly.” Sebastian leaned back in his chair and smiled lazily. “I deceived my father the same way in my depraved youth, when he paid my monthly upkeep and I had need of more ready coin than he was willing to provide.” “What did you need it for?” Evie could not resist asking. The smile tarried on his lips. “I’m afraid the explanation would require a host of words to which you would take strong exception.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

It seems wrong to call it “business.” It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher—and none of us wavered in the belief that “stakes” didn’t mean “money.” For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.

Apple, the most successful firm selling a low-cost product at a premium price. The total material cost for the iPhone X is $370, a fraction of the $999 price tag.80 Put another way, Apple has the profit margin of Ferrari with the production volume of Toyota.

There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification. One is correlative with the other. Even with a margin in the investor’s favor, an individual security may work out badly. For the margin guarantees only that he has a better chance for profit than for loss—not that loss is impossible. But as the number of such commitments is increased the more certain does it become that the aggregate of the profits will exceed the aggregate of the losses. That is the simple basis of the insurance-underwriting business.

Trucking Authority Packages is a premier organization that assists all shapes and sizes of motor carriers across the United States. We ensure that they maintain Operating Authority and compliance with all DOT and FMCSA regulations to avoid fines and penalties. This way, trucking businesses do not have to worry about experiencing delays that can impact profit margins. We offer a wide variety of custom packages that meet the needs of thousands of carriers.

Therefore, the monopolist will tend to focus more on cost-cutting innovations, which will increase its profit margins. In contrast, a competitive firm might go for a moonshot to try to take over the market.

The current of impact investing is washing along the shores of a bifurcated world still organized to separate profit making from social and environmental problem solving. For now, this bifurcated world channels the energy of impact investors into the hidden pools and underground rivers on the margins of mainstream investment and philanthropic activity. But water has a powerful ability to reshape the world it flows through. The gathering weight of impact investment activity is wearing away the bedrock of seemingly immovable institutions and investment practices.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cult-like and marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn't with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. By this point in history free-market fundamentalists should be exiled to a similarly marginal status...They are saved from this fate only because their ideas...remain so profitable to the worlds billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch and ExxonMobil.

tougher than Jim Chambers. As Jim began to call out profit margins and supply costs, Ariel almost smiled, remembering her first year in Paris, when a mercurial sous chef had thrown a frying pan full of escargots at her. She’d stepped into his position three months later and then head chef three months after that. She wasn’t scared of little ol’ Legacy Jim. Sales had been slipping, sure, but the mismanaging heir apparent was looking for a scapegoat, not a solution. It was completely and utterly unfair that she was apparently the one he was trying to lead to the slaughter. She stood her ground. “This isn’t what your father would have wanted,” she said resolutely. “And it isn’t what I signed up for. There must be a compromise.” Jim’s face began to mottle and then flush fully.

Economy and the profit margin ruled—although, in hindsight, it does seem that this was a false economy. Ships had to be manned above capacity to allow for a 30, 40 or even 50 percent death rate from scurvy. Even without a high death rate, the effectiveness of a crew suffering from scurvy would have been remarkably low. And then there was the humane factor—rarely considered during these centuries.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

It seems wrong to call it "business." It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner. business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher — and none of us wavered in the belief that "stakes'' didn't mean "money." For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living- and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is — you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.

FAT MARGINS DRAW STIFF COMPETITION

If you only think about products based on what’s hot right now, you’ll eventually be threatened by a mass of competitors, and that’s when profit margins get squeezed. Amazon can be the best place to get started selling products, but if you just look at what’s selling on Amazon and try to sell that, you’ll struggle to build a real business. Why? Well, if someone else sells the same product for $30, you have to sell yours for $28. Then the next person will price his or her product at $26. Now there’s a race to the bottom on profit margin.

Munk Szondi used his unique knowledge of Levantine commodities to make money. According to the rules of the game, anything of value could be used in the betting. Thus when a pile of Maria Theresa crowns and chits representing Egyptian dried fish futures were on the table, Szondi would overplay his hand simply to get the fish. For Szondi invariably knew that Persian dinars were due to weaken in the next few days in relation to dried fish, and that a handsome profit would be his if he discounted the Maria Theresa crowns in Damascus, doubled the value of his fish futures by buying dinars on the margin in Beirut, sold a quarter and a third of each in Baghdad as a hedge against customs interference on the Persian border, and then saw to it that his courier with the fish futures arrived in Isfahan on Friday, a market day, when the fish futures would be most in demand.

Your client is that common animal, the Classic Narcissist. He doesn’t care if he’s making your life miserable, cutting into your profit margin, or getting you in trouble with the boss. He wants what he wants—and he wants it now, now, now.

So in a quest to balance rapid growth and increased profitability, startups (especially the software-as-a-service or SaaS kind) have adopted the rule that a company’s revenue growth rate added to the profitability margin should be equal to or greater than 40 percent.

Those that use only fundamental variables refer only to a company's business performance, not the relationship between that performance and its share price. Studies have sorted stocks using returns on equity or on total capital invested, growth in earnings per share, growth in assets—as opposed to sales growth—and various measures of profit margins. Companies with high marks on these variables are successful firms whose shares are inherently attractive to investors. However, consistent with the studies we discussed above, it is often the firms that ranked lowest on these measures—low returns on capital or narrow profit margins—that have tended to generate the highest future market returns.

The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes—like the discounters’ principle of the less you charge, the more you’ll earn. And here it is: the more you share profits with your associates—whether it’s in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts—the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies, not in trying to drag strangers into your stores for one-time purchases based on splashy sales or expensive advertising. Satisfied, loyal, repeat customers are at the heart of Wal-Mart’s spectacular profit margins,

The bottom line for these entities is to always increase their profit margins. To do so, there needs to be a constant increase in consumers and consumer appetites. By causing people to feel insecure through various forms of messaging and systematic pressure, corporations increase our cravings for more goods and services—essentially wealth and power. This drive keeps us focused on a very shallow version of ourselves.

The study found that when evaluating a young company, growth matters even more than profit margin or cost structure.

The worst feeling was when, in the middle of the night, the numbers didn’t compute as you needed them to, or they didn’t support the arguments the senior bankers expected to make at the client meeting later that day. That would leave you with two bad choices. You could change the thesis of the presentation to match the numbers, or you could fudge the numbers to fit the thesis. A third option—worse still—was to wake your managing director with a phone call. That was never smart. So you would usually alter a revenue assumption here and a margin assumption there, just enough so that none of the changes seemed too aggressive but in totality got you to the profitability and earnings growth needed to justify the deal. Where is the line, you would wonder briefly, between subjective business judgment and manipulation of data? Then you’d yawn and look at the clock and reply, Who gives a shit?

The power held by corporate giants was terrifying even before the CEO decided to leverage that power for their own murderous ends. A supply shortage. A profit-driven business decision. Cost cuts or poorly thought-out policies that reduced safety margins, forced people into unemployment, or added more pressure to frontline workers already stretched thin. A price hike of an essential medicine. (Wolfram hadn’t forged new ground there.) These things, especially in the health and medical industry, routinely killed far more people than the average serial killer could ever aspire to. And yet so few of them resulted in criminal charges. Indirect manslaughter for profit was far more societally acceptable than one person purposefully ending lives on a smaller scale.

No one made money on them. Value-basing the audit and applying its findings through a profit-improving management letter was perceived as a disruptive technology. The

Your profit margin does nothing for the client. The guilt you might feel about your high profit margin is merely about you and will only make you resist selling.

Despite arguments against speculation and its place in the commodity markets that shape our economy—and, therefore, our lives—without it, producers and users of commodities would have a difficult time facilitating transactions. Thanks to speculators, there is always a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer. Without them and the liquidity they provide, hedgers would likely be forced to endure much larger bid/ask spreads and, in theory, price volatility. Consumers would also suffer in the absence of speculators simply because producers would be forced to pass on their increased costs to allow for favorable profit margins.

That was the escapist cure for systemic poverty, the result of putting profit margins ahead of people for two hundred years. And when it all boiled down, that was the root cause of it all.

By 2008, Pfizer’s DTP patent was long expired, and there were sixty-three manufacturers making the vaccine in forty-two countries with large surpluses and very low margins. The Gates cabal solved these profiteering problems by brewing up a new (five diseases) vaccine by mixing the DTP, Hib, and hepatitis B formulas in a single syringe. That new combination became a “new vaccine.” The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) and WHO christened the novel, untested, and unlicensed concoction the “Pentavalent Vaccine” and recommended its use in developing countries to replace the DTP vaccine. Compliant Indian health ministries then phased out the DTP, which had been popular with doctors. Now, if any physician or individual wanted DTP, their only choice would be the Pentavalent vaccine.