Capital Spending Is Up. Why Aren't Shareholders Happy?
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What recent jump in U.S. corporate CapEx is the episode introducing?
I'm J.R.
Whalen in New York. Capital expenditure by U.S. companies is up, way up, at a pace not seen in almost 10 years. So why doesn't everyone see that as good news? We'll explain in a moment. First, these money headlines. U.S. consumers are boosting purchases of everything from clothes to furniture on the heels of the U.S. tax cut and rising wage gains. That's a relief for investors who had worried that soft spending would weigh on economic growth. Analysts had worried that rising gas prices would slow consumer spending in the near term. Compared with a year earlier, overall retail sales were up 4.7% in April and spending continued to outpace inflation. And the Bitcoin market is about to get a lot faster. Coinbase, which operates the largest U.S.
cryptocurrency exchange, says it will upgrade its systems with services that cater to ultra-fast traders. The upgrade is planned for later this year and will make Coinbase one of the first Bitcoin exchanges to welcome the controversial business of high-speed trading, in which computers are used to buy and sell stocks, futures, and other assets in the blink of an eye. They accounted for 55% of trading volume in the U.S.
How are consumer spending and Bitcoin trading updates setting the market context?
stock market last year, but they've only recently begun to trade in cryptocurrencies. This is your Money Briefing from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome back, everybody. It's taken a while, but U.S. companies are opening their wallets and spending more on factories, equipment, and other capital expenditures at a pace not seen in about seven years. Is that good news? Well, it depends on who you ask. And Wall Street Journal markets reporter Akani Ohtani is here to discuss. So, Akani, as you point out in your Wall Street Journal story, Investors and economists agree that capital expenditures, also known as CapEx, are good news for corporate profits and the broader economy. But what's held it back for the past seven years?
Well, companies have been really trying to reel back their spending and demonstrate to investors that they can exercise financial discipline. This was sort of a big concern in the years after the financial crisis, where obviously companies were left pretty strapped for cash. They had to go through layoffs, and investors were looking to see that companies weren't immediately going to funnel whatever extra cash they had left into investments. expensive projects that might not pan out. And then after oil prices sort of peaked most recently around 2014, 2015, we also saw another sort of drop in CapEx as energy firms were forced to cut back spending and stop drilling as much. But we've really started to see a pickup in the last three months.
And that's actually put us on course for the fastest pace of CapEx since 2011.
And the tax laws had a lot to do with that, hasn't it?
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say for sure how much, but investors are largely attributing the big pickup in CapEx that we've seen recently to the tax law just because it has incentivized companies bringing back foreign profits to the U.S. by offering just a one-time relatively low tax on those profits. And companies are now sitting on extra piles of cash and sort of deciding what to do with it.
And a number you have in your story, just an overall look at the spending, is up by 24%?
Yeah, year over year.
It's not like these companies are having to raise cash. A lot of them have had cash stockpiled on the sideline for years.
Yeah, and that's why you would think investors would be celebrating this because finally companies are starting to spend money not just on buybacks and dividends, but also on investing in their own businesses. Things like buying equipment and upgrading equipment and buying new factories and land and things like that that typically you would think would boost long-term profitability.
But the investors, or the shareholders specifically, they're a fickle bunch, because while this can be seen as high-octane fuel for the economy, shareholders are sort of cool to the idea because they are more looking for short-term results, kind of like, what have you done for me lately?
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