No More Quarterly Earnings Reports? Trump’s Had Worse Ideas.

13 thoughts on “No More Quarterly Earnings Reports? Trump’s Had Worse Ideas.”

1. Why does the “very stable genius” need to weigh in and and control everything? Oh, that is correct, that is the goal…………………………..

   1. And we are not talking about Epstein. A new different subject every day until one finally gets legs !

2. For a guy who spent an awful lot of time complaining about China, he sure does sound envious of them.

3. I am guessing that the Wall Street firms who like to trade around quarterly earnings announcements won’t be in favor. Two less times per year to try to manipulate the public into either buying from WS or selling to WS- based on the gamble related to greed/fear prior to upcoming earnings announcements.
   But here is where I am coming from on that issue – a public company that has been my most profitable investment ever, stopped (years ago) providing any future guidance or having any interaction with analysts. I have been forced to educate myself on the company, its competitors and the market in which it operates. If given the choice, I am 100% sure that the CEO would opt out of quarterly reporting. I would still hold onto all the shares I own.

4. Debt covenants won’t change.

5. Isn’t the opposite true though? That the urgency of creating capex urgency is creating short term thinking on earnings? As in “we have to be seen as spending a boatload of money on AI Capex every quarter to get our stock to go up?”

   1. I mean I guess, but you’re venturing perilously close to infinite regress-style reasoning there.

      1. A while back a big honcho at Meta was quoted as saying “The money we are spending may well be going down the drain, but we cannnot afford not to spend in case it’s the real thing” or something to that effect. I just shake my head regreting that those cash piles were not all directed to share buybacks instead!

6. I’m suspicious of Trump’s motives whenever he suggests anything new. After all, he’s always motivated to do what’s best for Donald. Period. During this time of expanding and entrenching his power, why would he suggest doing away with quarterly reports? How could that specific rule change help solidify his power and control? First, by eliminating a source of information about business conditions and the economy, reducing competition w/ his self-serving, generally misleading narrative about such conditions. Second, and more generally, it eliminates news flow competition w/ his narrative about anything. Period. Trump is thinking and envisioning way outside the traditional political and policy boxes, always with an eye toward eliminating ideas and actions that contest his oft-expressed (misleading) views. He’s well past the point of thinking he’s invincible. Someday, he’ll probably meet an Icarus-like fate but he’s changing the rules day-by-day to solidify his autocracy. Dangerous times for the free flow and development of ideas.

   1. I’ll tempt fate and posit a belief that I think is at least close to factual, and an opinion that I think is hard to argue against.

      Re the former: Trump doesn’t know how showers or groceries work, so if he actually posits something actually new, it’s going to be of the injecting bleach and bombing hurricanes variety. Any reality-based proposal coming out of Trump’s mouth as an original idea, especially as it pertains to business and accurate financial reporting, is positively laughable.

      Re the latter: some Project 2025 dude is helping to run American media into the ground, while his wife is scooping it up at Palantir. Despite the risks of stating the obvious, it seems far more plausible that enough bags of money fell out of CEO’s pockets while surveying the grounds of the Trump Presidential Library/Aircraft Hangar or all-new Marriott Bonvoy Rose Garden, that all of sudden, it won’t be long before “quarterly reporting” is just another Fake News. Any notion of Trump doing this in the best interests of American businesses’ long-term futures is belied by his cornerstone that foreign suppliers are paying the IMPORT tariffs. Yeah, no. Just another toll booth and point of control.

7. I think making earnings every 6 months is a great idea, although stock prices will probably gap up or down by larger amounts when earnings are released. It probably will allow for better, longer-term planning, which would be good in the long run.

8. Ah, another sighting of the ‘Chinese 100-year mentality’. I’m not sure where this comes from given that 50 years ago China was just coming out of the Cultural Revolution which was not a great time for corporate strategists. The notion of embedded Chinese long-termism doesn’t hold up to even cursory scrutiny, so I’m amazed it’s become such a fixture of analysis.

   1. The roots of this are in Chinese astrology. I actually learned about this back in College, not in a business or economics class, but in a history of Asian religions class.

      Chinese astrology operates in a sort of cycles-within-cycles approach. Rather than breaking things into lunar months like the Western/Greek zodiac, it’s years, with a focus on the numbers 12 and 10, hence the 12 years of the Chinese zodiac. This fits into a larger cycle of 60 (12 * 10 / 2) years, which then fits into a larger still era of 300 years–which was seen as the typical length of an imperial dynasty (there are more exceptions than examples of this, but the idea held).

      A big part of the reason people still believe in the Chinese long-term mentality is because the Chinese themselves believe it. They firmly believe that their culture plans in generational terms.

      Interestingly, where this did come up in business/econ classes, it wasn’t about China, it was about Japan. We were taught that Japanese managers had a long-term outlook, which was why Japanese car companies were so successful in the 80s and 90s. Their long-term approach, we were told, allowed them to focus on gaining market share at the expense of margins while Western auto makers’ focus on quarterly profits consistently cost them long-term market share.