繼續整理學習美國投資書《終極股息投資攻略》第5章，作者來自美國基金評級公司晨星(Morningstar)。
Of Profits and Profitability
For deeply cyclical companies--steel mills, automobile manufacturers, chemical producers, oil refineries--the chance that current earnings per share are representative of the long-term average at any given time is pretty low. More than likely, you'll find earnings at either a peak or a trough.
We can ask this same question about the market in general: Are corporate profits closer to the bottom, the top, or merely average? One way to consider this question is to look at after-tax corporate profits as a percentage of national income (an economic statistic similar to GDP), as depicted in Figure 5.9.Historically, after-tax corporate profits have claimed 4.9 percent of the nation's income. The rest goes mainly to employee compensation, taxes, and other areas of the economy. This figure, too, has changed over time, but it's had a tendency to revert to the long-term mean. When this share is well above average, pressures of one kind or another (higher wage demands by employees, slackening economic growth, higher taxes) push it lower. When it is below average and business investments are less profitable, corporations stop investing in new capacity until the economy recovers and they can use existing resources more efficiently.
Since we're starting our forward-looking analysis in 2006, the fact that this profit share is well above historical averages doesn't bode well. Claiming 6.4 percent of the national income in 2006, corporate profits are some 30 percent above average. That has been a boon for recent stock price action and dividend growth, but only if the current level of corporate profitability can be sustained can we claim that current payout ratios leave room for improvement. There's not a one-to-one correlation between the S&cP's earnings per share and this statistic; a number of other factors are at work. But if we make the simple assumption that S&P profits are also 30 percent above normal, then the sustainable payout ratio of the market is not 32 percent today but 42 percent--a level that leaves a lot less room for future dividend increases.
