Without the accounting changes and the effects of lower interest payments, profits have grown no more spectacularly in the past five years than in 1993-97.Strong jobs and wage growth helps keep consumer demand going, of course.
Over time, they and other rich people earn a lot of money from the capital they have accumulated: it comes in the form of dividends, capital gains, interest payments, profits from private businesses, and rents.
As well as curbing exports, this could also lift imports if some car models are only made abroad.If Japan's trade deficit widens, the fate of its current-account surplus will depend on foreign-investment income (interest payments, profits and dividends).
But gradually the search moves from such arcane matters as computer glitches and eroded O-rings to such mundane ones as scheduling, loan payments, profit margins, bureaucratic inertia, political pressures.
Rather than rely on household surveys or estate records, they worked backward from the capital income that taxpayers report on their annual 1040s: dividend payments, capital gains, rents, royalties, interest payments, and profits from unincorporated businesses.
Belgium and Italy, for instance, give dividend payments and profits flowing to equity holders some of the same perks enjoyed by interest payments.
When those payments stopped, profits plunged and the company lied about the reason.
In the last three years it has returned more than £600m to the DfT in premium payments and profits.
Arguably, if company taxes were less onerous, a climate could be created in which the government could scrap the right of firms to set interest payments against profits.
The war room's handiwork is evident in Mr. Kerry's first big economic plank: his pledge in a speech on Friday to no longer allow American companies to defer income tax payments on profits earned abroad.
