Behind the deals, claims the documentary, lie easy profits for estate agents.
In fact, we can be confident that right now clever-clogs bankers and financial engineers are designing ingenious schemes to game and get round the current regulations - because there lie spectacular profits.
It cleaned up in part by convincing academia and business that potential profits lay in resolving environmental problems.
But they soon realized that greater profits lay in ammunition, and they began importing Chinese-made 7.62-mm.
The firm's roots and most of its profits lay in making memory chips; Intel's microprocessor group was just a small niche.
The premise of its "project" was that future profits lay in economies of scale and cross-selling in the retail business, since both SocGen and BNP have large branch networks in France.
Those two carriers, as well as all their network rivals, once thought that the path to profits lay in offering everything to passengers -- hot food, frequent flier programs, flights to every corner of the country.
Ships and cargoes could be seized and sold, but the most fantastic profits lay in slave-raiding for men, women and children, who were stripped, beaten and transported back to port in chains, where they were put to hard labor, ransomed for extravagant sums, conscripted into private harems or sold at auction.
Pickens had acquired the reputation of being a corporate raider whose skill lay in making profits out of bidding for companies but without actually acquiring them.
Our narrator grants us a dose of relief: "the good news was that no matter how hard the City tried, or the owners in the City tried, it could not make absolutely everything about profit and need.… People's lives would always seep out toward freedom, trashy or hilarious or messy or sexy or whatever — toward things that lie beyond profit and need and order and economy".
"Even though Frito-Lay profits grew 7percentt -- below long-term trends -- the balance of the portfolio was remarkable," said Andrew J. Conway, a beverage analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston.
