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.

They are calling them a "threat" to equity valuations. The job of a sell-side analyst is assess upside and downside risks to equity market returns, and in this case, the analyst is contending that a potential decline corporate profit margin driven by an increase in wages is a "threat" to _equity valuations_, and not so to society at large (one can make arguments about the interaction between society and equity markets, but that is not the point they are making here).

I would recommend that you spend some time learning a little more about the sell-side world before throwing barbs at internet strangers. I'm not currently associated with that world in any way, shape or form, but I know enough to question the "Finance is evil/Goldman is the devil" meme.

> They are calling them a "threat" to equity valuations.

What they're saying is that, as wages rise, corporate profit margins will decrease. That's a non-pejorative, value neutral way to describe the phenomenon.

However, when they chose to discuss it, they littered the discussion with pejorative, non-value-neutral language. Those word choices were their intentional choice, to frame rising wages as bad, and corporate profits as good.

> I'm not currently associated with that world in any way, shape or form

Nor did I say you were. What I said was that your reading comprehension skills were poor. Reading comprehension doesn't just mean being able to parse the syntax and know what the words mean. You need to be able to read a text, and see how the words chosen indicate what the writer is trying to imply in their writing.

Based on my experience, I think the phrasing[0] is pretty much par for the course for equity research reports, and does not indicate any sort of orientation in their value system. I can see how it can appear malicious or pejorative for people who don't write and consume these reports on a day to day basis. That being said, I think the author and you are reading too much into the particular words here.

In any event, if I haven't managed to convince you, let us agree to disagree :). Cheers.

[0] Threat, for example, is one of the components of SWOT analysis, and is used in the sense of a downside risk factor and doesn't imply anything malicious.

The core principle behind all equity research reports is that the value of the equity being discussed is the most important thing. That's not a problem -- the principle behind a physics paper is that the particle being discussed is the most important thing. The problem is that equity researchers drive major decisions that affect millions of lives, and is too powerful compared to say, physicists.

I think this is reading too much into it. One day I'm going to recommend killing Apache somewhere and you guys are going to try to get me jailed for attempted murder of a Native American.

Definitely. Those wacky "words mean things" people, amirite?

We can safely leave out the personal jabs, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html