Analysts expect West Fraser’s adjusted profit for the third quarter will increase six per cent from a year ago to $1.35 per share, according to estimates compiled by Thomson Reuters.

The company issues its earnings after markets close Monday.

from
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Canadian+lumber+producers+higher+demand+China+should+boost+prices/9089055/story.html#ixzz2j42LbqpV

All depends in how the numbers are presented to which audience.

Fully modernize its operations, is code for increased production, and less jobs.

They say they are very commited to their employees. YET, the news of the mill closure was released to the public before telling their houston employees. These bastards don’t care about their employees if that’s how they relay this news to them!!!

“…increased production, and less jobs” is what every business is supposed to be striving for. And those that don’t achieve what they’re striving for won’t survive, so we’re told. But what we’re not told is that the ‘machine’ that replaces the man still has costs that have to be recovered in prices. Only no one pays an income to a machine. What it ‘consumes’ only transfers a cost, carrying it forward and never liquidating it. Only a human consumer can do that. Liquidate a cost through price. When that human consumer receives an income he can spend to do it. The current crop of politicians, whatever Party they represent, all see the answer to the apparent dilemma as creating ‘another job’. But ‘another job’ at another wage, creates another cost, that then has to be recovered through another price. Which still doesn’t liquidate the cost of the machine. And we wonder why debt levels keep rising, and there’s poverty in the midst of plenty.

I wonder who these big companies will sell their products to when no one has a job and can’t pay for it.

Look at vehicles. 60k for a pick up truck? Some cost much more than that. People will blame unions but it goes much deeper than that. I make a great living and I couldn’t even begin to afford 60k for a pick up truck.

Loan terms get longer and longer. People don’t look at the cost of a vehicle anymore, they just want to see if they can afford the payment. Who cares if it costs 60k as long as I can afford to pay 900 a month or 450 by weekly then that’s the way it is.

How about houses? 300k for four walls and a roof? Come on…ridiculous.

West Fraser and Canfor are basically in a race to the bottom and the last one there wins. Meanwhile the workers keep getting laid off and move further and further down the poverty chain.

You’re absolutely right, Mercenary. And it’s good to see that someone else is able to see the problem that’s developing. Instead of just blaming ‘unions’, on the one side, or ‘corporations’ on the other. It’s a far bigger problem than the supposed greed of either, and runs across the whole gamut of the economy.

Where ‘financially’, companies, and all of us, for that matter, keep working with bigger and bigger figures, in terms of the dollars we compute things in. But neither are really any better off in terms of what all those dollars will actually BUY.

Personally, the overall standard of living of most of us continues to increase, but our overall COST of living is always advancing still FASTER. With greater and greater overall indebtedness bridging the gap. While it can. And those for whom that standard of living doesn’t increase fall further and further behind. And their number increases yearly.

The current political push, by all our Parties, is for ‘full employment’ ~ jobs, jobs, jobs ~ but that won’t solve the problem. Any country that needs to have 100% of its workforce employed, and working harder, and longer, to produce 100% of what its consumers need and desire is a hopelessly inefficient country.

In ‘physical’ terms the cost of manufacturing lumber, pick-up trucks, houses, anything you care to name, is actually falling.

If that wasn’t the case, then all the various labour saving efficiencies that have been introduced into all these processes were utterly useless. And they’re far from that, when you look at what an hour’s labour will produce in product now with their aid vs. what it produced in times past, even the recent past, without them. But does the ‘financial’ cost mirror the ‘physical’ one?

We’ve long ago solved the ‘production’ problem, and each increase in productivity through further automation and mechanisation is far from a ‘curse’ physically, unless those who worship work simply for the sake of work can make a case for never ending drudgery as being the highest thing any human being can aspire to.

Usually, you’ll find such people don’t contemplate doing the kind of work they’d wish to perpetuate on others ~ they consider themselves ‘too good’ to have to. Or too smart. Still they persist, assured of the moral righteousness that “no one should be allowed to ‘eat’ unless he has first worked”. And utterly lost when it comes to offering up an explanation of just what we’d ever DO with all the huge surplus of ‘food’ we’d have these days if EVERYONE did just that. Why we’d have to find a way to destroy it, they’d likely say, “…to keep the price up.”

It’s the ‘distribution’ problem that still besets us. And the agency of distribution is MONEY. That great taboo subject that must never be discussed, let alone questioned, when it comes to whether it accurately REFLECTS the ‘physical’ FACTS it’s supposed to be able to do.

We just have to look over seas to see our future, generational mortgages that get passed down to your children, Living entire lives in debt. i think im going to go back in time. try to find a steam car.