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Comment by throwaway_srb | Hacker News Reader

Is this what happens when someone reads a sell side report for the first time? The author is having a fit merely over choice of words in the GS report. The GS analysts aren't passing a moral judgement as to whether rising wages are a good thing or a bad thing. They are merely pointing out that current stock market valuations are baking in a corporate profit margin that may not hold in the face of rising wages. That's it.

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This was my take away too. Objectively, a decreasing gap between wages and productivity probably is a threat to corporate profits. Reasonable people can disagree about the importance of that threat vs the well being of American workers, but the writer seemed to miss that that was not the point of the Goldman report.

The question is of the GS report's intent. Was it merely so they could make plans to adapt to this new inevitability or a subtle call to address the issue by prevention, perhaps by shortchanging US workers in other ways? It's not wrong that this is raising eyebrows when the interpretation has yet to be proved.

I'd say the point of the reporter's report was what the GS report pointedly did not report.

> or a subtle call to address the issue by prevention, perhaps by shortchanging US workers in other ways

This is ridiculous. It's an equity research report, the intent is clearly to report on the equities market. Who would this even be a subtle call to? There is no cabal of capitalist overlords who are out to shortchange workers.

This is like saying a research report about a threat to e.g. Coke's EMEA sales because of political instability might be a "subtle call" for Western governments to recolonize the African continent.

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