At the risk of jinxing things (there’s no such risk; superstition’s for the mentally desperate) ahead of big-tech results this week, earnings season in the US is going swimmingly.

And why wouldn’t it, by the way? Notwithstanding the fact that corporate America admits of the same “haves”/”have-nots” divide which defines American society more generally, it’s good to be a corporate. The list of perks is long indeed. You get favorable tax treatment, for example, but that’s just the beginning of it. You’re also immune to most written laws and aren’t expected to abide by any unwritten ones either. Hell, when you’re a corporate, you can get away with murder. Literally. Some companies are outright genocidal and proud of it.

Anyway, corporate America’s beating on the top-line more frequently than any reporting season since the go-go days of 2021, when the C-suite raised prices to consumers above and beyond input cost inflation knowing trillions in “stimmy” could be readily exploited for a few (hundred) basis points of margin.

There’s the chart. A chart. (“I’m a god, I’m not the God.”) Three quarters of companies are beating on the top-line, and nearly everyone (84%) has managed to engineer a profit beat. (There are so many ways to “beat” on the bottom line that any management team which can’t is derelict. That’s another perk of being a corporate: “Earnings” can mean whatever you want it to mean. Nobody cares about GAAP metrics.)

The sharp upward inflection in sales beats is notable. As SocGen’s Manish Kabra remarked, profit margin surprises were the main drivers of earnings beats since 2021, “but the latest earnings show the strongest top-line surprises in four years.”

If you’re curious, corporate America generates about $160,000 in sales for every employee, as illustrated in the chart below, also from SocGen’s Kabra.

I haven’t checked that math and I’m assuming I don’t have to. Do note: It took 11 years for that metric to rise by 50% post-financial crisis. It’s up 45% over the last five years — i.e., since the pandemic. That speaks to, among other things, pricing power post-COVID. Whether that’s sustainable I don’t know.

Kabra ran through a checklist of other metrics and activity indicators. “Capex to sales is rising across sectors, leverage is at its lowest since 2014, buybacks are up 16% and dividends up 6% over 12 months,” he wrote.

The S&P’s just a whisker away from SocGen’s year-end target of 6400. Although they’re sticking with that for now, they see “upside risk.” “The Fed card hasn’t played out [and] peak excitement for US stocks involves a broadening of the index,” Kabra went on, suggesting the benchmark has room to run as high as 6750. “We see bubble risk only beyond 7500,” he said.