Largest US Companies Total Audited Pretax Earnings Declined By 28% in Annual Year ended December 2020, While US GDP Declined By 3.5% in 2020. Audited Pretax Earnings % Change is a Much More Reliable and Relevant Measure Than GDP % Change.

 There were 56 US Companies with December fiscal year ends and with stock market caps above $100 bil currently.  Of these 56 US Companies, two of them have not released their annual 2020 earnings to the SEC yet. That leaves 54 US Companies.

From a review of Company SEC filings, the below table shows the Gold-Standard US GAAP Pretax Income (Loss) From Continuing Operations for both the years ended December 2020 and 2019 for these 54 US Companies.

The Haves and the Have Nots During Covid ..... Big 4 Tech Companies 4Q 2020 Pretax Profits Up 43%, While Number of US People in Long Food Bank Lines Continue To Grow

 From Company December 2020 Quarter Earnings Releases Filed With the SEC:

The Reddit Group Movement is Acting Like the US Fed in Creating Artificially High Common Stock Prices. In the Reddit's Case, This is Driven By Punishing the Gambling Hedge Fund Short Sellers of Struggling Companies.

The Reddit Group Movement is doing precisely what the US Fed has done ….. decouple the market values of common stocks from their intrinsic values from company fundamentals.

 

The Reddit Group Movement’s investment in common stocks were driven by their desire to punish hedge funds that sell common stocks of poorly-performing companies short with the expectation that they can buy the common stock in the future at a substantially lower price and thus make a nice profit.  By selling common stocks short, these hedge funds are not investing in the stock market but rather gambling that something negative will happen to the company’s stock price.

 

The Reddit Group Movement’s huge investment in these struggling companies have been very successful in short-squeezing the hedge fund to buy the common stock at a much higher price and take a huge loss rather than their expected profit.

 

The Reddit Group Movement’s huge investment in these struggling companies have pushed the stock prices of these companies so high that they are now monumentally overvalued based on these companies’ actual and expected earnings and their estimated discounted cash flows.

 

But it doesn’t make any difference because stock market prices are based on buyers and sellers.  If there are more buyers than sellers, the stock prices rise ….. and oh how there have been more buyers than sellers so far in the Reddit Group Movement.

 

The overall US economy really sucked in 2020 with a GDP decline of 3.5%, the worst decline since 1946.

 

But even more importantly, when the books are all closed for 2020, the Total Gold-Standard US GAAP Pretax Income of all US Companies Combined will decline by more than 10% and these will be audited numbers by highly-respected, independent CPA accounting professionals.  GDP numbers are not nearly as accurate since they are simply the grinding out of so many gigantic numbers with many assumptions baked into them by many economists.

 

So why has the overall US stock market increased so much in such a horrible year economically?

 

It has all been driven by the actions of the US Fed which artificially increased the stock market prices substantially above what their true intrinsic values are fundamentally.

 

First, the US Fed has bought and is continuing to buy trillions and trillions of dollars of US Bonds and of risky US Corporate Bonds.

 

What that does is create liquidity ….. trillions and trillions of more cash available for investors to invest.

 

And second, the US Fed drove down short and intermediate-term interest rates on T-Bills and on Notes to almost 0%.  And the interest rates on longer-term Notes and Bonds have followed suit in lock-step and thus have also seen their interest rates drop precipitously.

 

So all of the substantial increase in liquidity that the US Fed has created has gone into the US stock market rather than into Debt Securities because the interest you can earn on the Debt Securities is so incredibly miniscule.

 

And to top it off, smart money sees beforehand that the result of this US Fed action will inevitably create a huge increase in stock market prices since there will be so many more buyers than sellers of common stock and thus beforehand this smart money goes long on common stocks creating an even much more artificially-inflated common stock market divorced from fundamentals.

And to put much more kindling on this fire, the many Technical Chart analysts push these stock prices of struggling companies to even higher levels by the strategies they use to quickly buy rising common stock prices and also ones that are breaking out.

The Reddit Group is just showing how they can create artificially high common stock prices just like the US Fed has.

 

The US Fed gets effusive praise for its actions but the Reddit Group gets vilified by many for doing simply the same thing.  Go Figure! 

Four $1 Trillion Stock Market Cap Companies: Spreader of Pay Income Inequality Status ..... Some Good News For Silicon Valley Cos and Some Very Bad News For Washington State Cos

 For the Most Recent Two-Year Period

• Alphabet's Audited Pretax Income Up By 45.7% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Up 31.1% for a Very Low Ratio of 1.5 Times ..... Very Fair to Employees Thus Clearly Not a Spreader of Pay Income Inequality
• Apple's Audited Pretax Income Down By 8.0% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Up By 4.3% ..... Extremely Fair to Employees Thus Clearly Not a Spreader of Pay Income Inequality
• Amazon's Audited Pretax Income Up By 267.2% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Up By 1.4% For an Off-the-Charts Ratio of 189.1 Times ..... Incredibly Unfair to Employees Thus a Super Super Super  Spreader of Pay Income Inequality
• Microsoft's Audited Pretax Income By Up 45.4% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Up By Only 2.7% for an Extremely High Ratio of 17.1 Times ..... Extremely Unfair to Employees Thus a Super Super Spreader of Pay Income Inequality 

For Just the Most Recent One-Year Period

·  Alphabet's Audited Pretax Income Up By 13.5% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Up 4.8% for a Reasonable Ratio of 2.8 Times ..... Fair to Employees Thus Not a Spreader of Pay Income Inequality

·  Apple's Audited Pretax Income Up By 2.1% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Up By a very low 0.3% For a High Ratio of 6.3 Times .....Unfair to Employees Thus a Spreader of Pay Income Inequality

·  Amazon's Audited Pretax Income Up By 24.1% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Up By a Miniscule 0.04% For a Completely Off-the-Charts Ratio of 579.4 Times ..... Incredibly Unfair to Employees Thus a Super Super Super Super Spreader of Pay Income Inequality

·  Microsoft's Audited Pretax Income Up By 21.4% and Median Company Employee Pay and Benefits Down By 0.2% for an Off-the-Charts Negative Ratio ..... Incredibly Unfair to Employees Thus a Super Super Super Spreader of Pay Income Inequality

From a review of these Companies' 10-K and Proxy Statement filings, the table below shows the Audited Pretax Income and Median Employee Pay and Benefits for each of these four Companies for the most recent three years.

                   

Covid-19 Vaccine Developer and Producer BioNTech SE, With World HQs in Mainz, Germany and With North American HQs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Saw Its Top-Tier Executives' Annual Compensation and Benefits Increase By a Seemingly High 553% Per Year in 2019 from 2018. But Given That BioNTech Will Be Saving the Lives of Tens of Millions of People Worldwide, Their Compensation and Benefits Should Be Even Substantially Higher Than It Is. Just Saying.

From an F-4 BioNTech SE's F-4 Registration Statement filing  with the US SEC , below are BioNTech's Top-Tier Executives Annual Total Compensation and Benefits for each of two consecutive completely full years of employment for the most recent year 2019 as compared to 2018.

Dr. Ozlem Tureci's amounts are excluded in the above table because she was not a Company employee for the full year of 2018.

 

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Covid-19 Drug Company Moderna Inc's Top-Tier Executives Average Annual Pay and Employee Benefits Increased By a Very Modest 2.4% Per Year in the Most Recent Two Years. In a Huge Pay Income Inequality Expansion Initiative, the US Congress Overwhelmingly Passed Legislation That Permits Companies Like Moderna To Not Have To Disclose Its Very Useful Median Pay and Employee Benefits For Its Company Employees Like So Many Other Companies Are Still Required To Do.

From Company Proxy Statement filings with the SEC Moderna's Proxy Statement , below are Moderna Inc's Top-Tier Executives Annual Total Compensation for each of two consecutive completely full years of employment for the most recent two years.

East Boston-based Meridian Bancorp's Audited Diluted Earnings Per Share Increased By 22.6% in 2019, While the Company's Employee Median Pay Decreased By a Huge 23.2% Also in 2019

From Company Proxy Statement and 10-K filings with the SEC, below are Meridian Bancorp's Median Annual Pay for its employees and Audited Diluted EPS for the Company for the most recent two fiscal years.