Supermarkets 1 versus Greens 0

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Good on the Greens for trying but this argument is weak:

Outgoing Woolworths boss Brad Banducci was threatened with six months in jail for contempt of the Senate after he refused to directly answer questions about a profit metric, in a fiery Senate hearing that went off the rails on Tuesday.

Mr Banducci declined to confirm if the supermarket giant’s return on equity was 26 per cent, twice that of the big banks but similar to miners, saying it was not the best way to measure the profits of supermarkets. The retailers, like the big miners, argue that other metrics such as return on capital are a better indicator of how profitable the business is.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.