Watch Me Pull A Record Profit Out Of My Hat!

Again?

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, reported income Thursday that shattered its own record for the biggest profit from operations by a U.S. corporation, earning $14.83 billion in the third quarter.

The Irving, Texas-based company has reported unprecedented back-to-back quarters, the end of the most recent coinciding with a rapid plunge in crude prices. Benchmark oil prices fell another $2.21 to $65.29 Thursday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, about 56 percent off record highs in July.

Exxon said net income jumped nearly 58 percent to $2.86 a share in the July-September period. That compares with $9.41 billion, or $1.70 a share, a year ago.

The previous record for U.S. corporate profit was set in the last quarter, when Exxon Mobil earned $11.68 billion.

No doubt about it.  I gotta get me a new economic system.

I mentioned in class last night that most of what we discuss in telecommunications has little to do with technology and everything to do with money, noting that these corporation aren't charities.  When asked if they thought phone or oil companies have our best interests always in mind, my students laughed.  They clearly read their Adam Smith:

[The rate of profit] is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin...As [merchants and master manufacturers'] thoughts...are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter.

Corporatism (read: fascism).  You're soaking in it.

ntodd