Aggregate corporate profits are not a pile of company results — they are the accounting consequence of macro flows: Profits = Investment − Government Saving − Foreign Saving + Dividends − Personal Saving. This page rebuilds that identity quarterly from BEA NIPA data (the "profits equation" of the Kalecki–Levy tradition), showing exactly which sector paid for each quarter's profits — the post-2020 resilience of margins, for instance, was largely the government-deficit term doing the work.
This graph illustrates the Kalecki equation, which decomposes aggregate corporate profit into economically meaningful components. The classic version of the equation is:
Profit = Investment + Government Deficit (-Government Saving) + Current Account Balance (-Foreign Saving) + Consumption Financed by Profit - Personal Saving out of Wages.
Since consumption financed by profit is equivalent to dividends minus saving out of dividends, and savings out of dividends and wages together constitute personal saving, this equation can also be expressed as:
Profit = Investment - Government Saving - Foreign Saving + Dividends - Personal Saving. When gross profit (net profit + capital consumption) is considered, this leads to the specific form of the Kalecki equation shown in the chart above.
Informed takeaways: Holding other factors constant, a higher gross investment, a higher government deficit, a higher dividend payout from firms, and a higher current account balance cause a higher aggregate profit. Meanwhile, a higher personal saving and a higher capital consumption cause a lower aggregate profit. For a sophisticated analysis using the Kalecki Equation, refer to Minsky (1986, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy), in which Kaleckian distribution theory is used to explain business cycles, inflation, and even the real wage; the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center has run its profits forecasting on this framework for nearly a century.
Inventory and depreciation are always adjusted to their current value if a firm uses historical cost. The statistical discrepancy is the measurement error between GDP and GDI, which is stated in table 5.1 of NIPA. For details, you may refer to the NIPA handbook.