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When you're considering the entire US economy as a whole, top level macro limits come into play.
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The S&P 500 is not a proxy for the entire economy... Well, true, exactly as I mentioned in my post.
" You have to be careful not to assume that (say) the S&P 500 typifies all companies in the US both public and private--the public companies could pull ahead (or fall behind) relative to private companies for a while. Though that's probably not a big factor, since public companies include almost all the big ones."But in any case
(1) my suggested graph of corporate net margins WAS the entire corporate US, not the S&P 500 subset. (
St. Louis Fed (FRED): Corporate Profits After Tax (without IVA and CCAdj)/Gross Domestic Product | FRED )
(2) the two results are not in any case all that wildly different. That's partly because such a broad set has aggregate economic characteristics not so different from the whole set, and partly because the S&P 500 covers a lot of the US economic corporate economic activity. For example, there are 81 non-bank companies in the S&P 500 with revenues over $40bn, and only 5 private companies of any type that big.
Jim
