My point is that the question is how you define "profitable". The current definition of a "profitable company" is all about the stock price increase. The prob

My point is that the question is how you define "profitable". The current definition of a "profitable company" is all about the stock price increase. The problem is that manufacturing has a hard, fixed, upper limit on how much you can manipulate your company. Your Thneed(tm) sells for $X--you can't dramatically increase the price per unit (barring monopoly status). You probably can't increase demand dramatically either. You can only reduce labor and R&D to zero. So, the maximum amount of cash you can earn is completely constrained and straightforward to compute. Your stock price has some relation to this and thus also has a limit. However, if you switch to "financialization", there's no limits. You have margins. You have multiplers. Things are easy to hide and difficult to compute. The stock price goes gangbusters for a while and you have a great "profitable company". Then something goes wrong and suddenly the business needs cash rather than "financial instruments". Then the "financialization" unwinds and kills the core of the company. The problem is that the "stock market" has become "lottery tickets" instead of "corporate ownership". People demand stock price increases even if the business is quite profitable--this means that "financialization" will always triumph.