#stock buybacks

[odinsblog]

#politics #ronald reagan #stock buybacks #capitalism #living wages #republicans #stock market #corporate greed #reaganism #economics #neoliberalism

[phoenixyfriend]

Ko-fi prompt from Klara:

can you please explain like I'm, not five, but, like, ten or twelve, if/why/why-not/how a Business that went from being owned by the founder/founder's heirs/a worker's collective, to being shareholder-owned, can go BACK to its original state?

That one is actually a pretty easy answer, it's just... not easy to implement.

Easier said than done and all that.

ONE: What does shareholder-owned mean?

The majority of the company is parsed out into shares, which are owned by people who do not work for the company. This is not the only way that a company can be owned by other people, but it's a common one. So what are shares?

Companies generally start out privately-owned. Whether this is by the found, by a wealthy investor, or by the bank, there is a specific person that you can point at and go "that person owns it." Sometimes, it's multiple people, split up in specific ways (e.g. started by a team of two that each owns 50% of the company by contract), but it's private.

At a certain point, the company may choose to go public. This means that they have assigned a value to the company, split that value up into a set of shares, and declared that those shares are worth a certain percentage of the company. If you own enough shares, you can direct the company's actions.

Let's say a company goes public with a net worth of $1million. They have split that $1mill into 100,000 shares worth $10 each (this one-share value is called the Initial Public Offering, or the IPO).

If a person buys 1,000 shares, they now "own" 1% of the company. With every share a person owns, they can vote once in shareholder elections for how and where the company goes. (This isn't getting into stuff like preferred stock, which is non-voting in exchange for things like higher dividends.)

If they buy 51,000 shares for a total of $510,000, they own 51% of the company, and now have what is called a controlling interest. This means that the person with those 51,000 shares can more or less unilaterally assign people to the board of directors, and so on.

At the initial public offering, a company will not necessarily put up all their stock for sale. When Apple first went public in 1980, they sold 8% of their stock, most of which went into paying off debs. The other 92% stayed with the then-current owners of the company. These days, most of Apple is owned by institutional investors, which means it's owned by other companies that invest on behalf of people.

So, a shareholder-owned company is owned by people who purchased part of the company, and the company used that money to fund its own growth, whether by paying off debts, buying a new factory, hiring more workers, and so on.

TWO: How do companies purchase back their own stock?

...with difficulty.

When a company has grown its wealth enough to purchase its own stock and start re-consolidating ownership, it's called a stock buyback. It happens with some regularity.

After a company has spent the money earned from the initial sales, that's it. They don't earn more money as shares go up in value, none of that actually goes to them, just to whoever is selling.

So there's this thing called 'dividends.' This is where a company pays out a portion of its profits to shareholders quarterly. Walmart currently pays its investors $0.57 per share, per quarter. For someone with 100,000 shares, that's $228,000/year.

(That's not actually that much for someone who owns over $15mill worth of stock, but it's something. It's not where the actual worth of the share is stored, but that's a whole other mess.)

For legal reasons, a company must act in the best interests of the shareholders. So if the shareholders believe that they will be best served by being paid out the profits as dividends, they will ask for those profits in dividends. If they decide they are best served by the purchase of a new factory, then that's what the money gets put towards. If they want to make the corporation bigger by buying a smaller company, then that's what they do.

Stock buybacks are done for a few reasons, like forcing the price per share to go up by creating scarcity (which is good for anyone looking to resell their stock at a profit), or making it so that dividends per share end up higher by lowering the number of shares to divide profits amongst.

Fun fact, one of the big things the covid-19 stimulus package had rules about was stock buybacks because large companies had previously used taxpayer money to bail out their own debts from the act of buybacks, and the government anticipated that stimulus money for covid-19 relief, meant to ensure employees stayed afloat, would be used on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends unless actively banned.

Did you know buybacks were illegal until the Reagan era?

THREE: So... where does that leave us?

Well... basically, the founder, heirs, or workers need to build up all the capital necessary to purchase at least 51% of the shares.

Which is a lot of money.

It can be done, but it's not easy to stuff that genie back in the bottle. A company that's already focused on ensuring dividends and capital gain are aimed at the shareholders is one that's not going to be paying their employees enough to build up those funds, you know?

It's not feasible unless the founder/heirs have stayed wealthy enough in their own right to buy it all back, or if the stock price plunges so low that the employees can purchase it all at rock bottom prices and then build it back from the ground up.

(Prompt me on ko-fi!)

#economics #stock market #capitalism #phoenix talks #ko fi #ko fi prompts #economics prompts #buybacks #stock buybacks

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Earlier this month, a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, triggering a massive fire and forcing everyone within a 1-mile radius of the crash to evacuate. To avoid a potential explosion, officials conducted a controlled detonation of five tankers three days later, sending carcinogenic vinyl chloride into the air. Two days later, residents of the 4,500-person village were told they could safely return home. Many questioned the safety of the air and water supply.

Since then, reporting has made clear that this environmental disaster was less a freak accident than a predictable outcome of lax safety measures and capitalist greed. Here’s what you need to know about the Norfolk Southern rail company.

NORFOLK SOUTHERN CHOSE NOT TO UPGRADE ITS TRAINS’ “CIVIL WAR-ERA” BRAKES.

A report in The Lever notes that the train that crashed in East Palestine was not equipped with Electronically Controlled Pneumatic brakes—fully electric brakes that experts say could have reduced the severity of the crash. Although Norfolk Southern once touted its use of ECP brakes, it lobbied against requiring them on trains carrying hazardous materials. An Obama-era rule required that HHFTs have ECP brakes, but the Trump administration overturned this rule.

NORFOLK SOUTHERN WORKERS DON’T GET PAID SICK TIME.

Remember when the Senate voted to avert a rail strike and deny workers sick leave? Norfolk Southern workers were among those affected. When investors encouraged Norfolk Southern to offer paid sick leave, the company said, OK, we won’t furlough people as often. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) has since demanded that rail companies offer workers at least seven days of paid sick leave.

RAIL COMPANIES REFUSE TO HIRE ENOUGH WORKERS.

Unions say that the rail industry’s use of furloughs to reduce the workforce stretches staff too thin. As Timothy Noah wrote in the New Republic, the 141-car train that crashed in East Palestine carried just two crew members and one trainee:

"On February 10, Anya Litvak of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that security camera footage 20 miles short of where the derailment occurred showed a rail car axle that appeared to be on fire. Why this information was not transmitted quickly to the train crew remains unknown, but it seems likely that the answer has something to do with the number of people who were in a position to sound the alarm."

NORFOLK SOUTHERN HAS SPENT BILLIONS ON STOCK BUYBACKS.

Norfolk Southern made $4.8 billion in operating profit in 2022, More Perfect Union reported, and paid shareholders $4.7 billion in stock buybacks and dividends.

As my colleague Hannah Levintova explained last year:

"A buyback is when companies purchase shares of their own company from investors, driving up the value of the remaining stock because there are fewer shares circulating. Buybacks are taxed at the lower capital gains rate, which maxes out at 20% for the wealthiest households. But for those investors who don’t sell their shares back to the company, there’s no tax—even though the value of their holdings has increased. Until that investor sells the asset, their wealth will grow tax-free. And thanks in part to a tax code loophole that enables the wealthy to pass shares on to their heirs, who can then skip paying capital gains taxes on them altogether, buybacks play a role in building untaxed generational wealth."

THE TRAIN THAT CAUSED THE CLOUD OF SMOKE OVER EAST PALESTINE WAS NOT CATEGORIZED AS A “HIGH-HAZARD FLAMMABLE TRAIN.”

Thanks to pressure from industry lobbyists, the “high-hazard flammable train” categorization applies only to trains carrying a narrow set of materials, like crude oil, The Lever also reported. That designation would have required that the train follow specific speed and braking restrictions.

DESPITE MAKING BILLIONS IN PROFIT, NORFOLK SOUTHERN INITIALLY OFFERED JUST $25,000 TO EAST PALESTINE.

Norfolk Southern managed to scrape together $25,000 for the town that’s been doused in toxic chemicals. People who fled their homes under fear of death can claim $1,000 per person per household. Since then, the company has announced increases in charity.

#us politics #news #mother jones #2023 #east palestine #ohio #norfolk southern #vinyl chloride #carcinogens #Electronically Controlled Pneumatic brakes #railway workers #railroads #railway unions #furloughs #paid sick leave #stock buybacks #high-hazard flammable train #charity #train derailment #hazardous chemical spill #corporate greed

[thoughtportal]

a very good video “this you?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Harshbarger

https://www.businessinsider.com/diana-harshbarger-congress-stocks-violation-stock-act-trades-tennessee-2021-8?op=1

https://www.safemedicines.org/2013/05/tennessee-pharmacist-pleads-guilty-to-selling-misbranded-kidney-dialysis-drug-536.html

#tiktok #tiktok ban #the RESTRICT Act #Diana Harshbarger #Robert Harshbarger #pharmaceuticals industry #pharmaceutical #Healthcare #FDA #china #this you #this you? #insider trading #stock buybacks #stock market #stonks

[progressivemillennial]

This is disgusting. I feel for all of those laid off workers. I have seen this happen to folks in my own life. Companies should invest in their business, provide better services for their customers, reduce costs, and share their profits with their employees--the people behind the profits. They should not give buybacks to their shareholders and then have the audacity to lay off workers on top of it.

#fuck mark zuckerberg #capitalism #eat the fucking rich #eat the rich #politics #us politics #progressive #america #meta #facebook #stock buybacks #disgusting #layoffs #guillotine

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Having to build a search-ranking algorithm that can withstand relevancy attacks funded by every legitimate business, every scammer, every influencer, every publisher, every religion and every cause on the entire planet Earth might just be an unattainable goal. As Elizabeth Lopatto put it:

[The] obvious degradation of Google Search [was]caused in part by Google’s own success: whole search engine optimization teams have been built to make sure websites show on the first page of search since most people never click through to the second. And there’s been a rise of SEO-bait garbage that surfaces first.

Search was Google’s crown jewel, its sole claim to excellence in innovation. Sure, the company is unparalleled in its ability to operationalize and scale up other peoples’ ideas, but that’s just another way of saying, “Google is a successful monopolist.” Since the age of the rail barons, being good at running other peoples’ companies has been a prerequisite for monopoly success. But administering other peoples’ great ideas isn’t the same thing as coming up with your own.

With search circling the drain, Google’s shareholders are losing confidence. In the past year, the company caved to “activist investors,” laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid all 12,000 salaries for the next 27 years.

- Google's AI Hype Circle: We have to do Bard because everyone else is doing AI; everyone else is doing AI because we're doing Bard.

#ai #ai hype #large language models #confident liars #bard #google #enshittification #llms #chatbots #monopoly #search quality #activist investors #tech layoffs #stock buybacks

[satzy]

#Evil Dead President #Labor in USA #Capital Manipulation #Reaganomics #Stock buybacks

[tomorrowusa]

Yep, there’s been yet another Norfolk Southern train wreck in Ohio. 

Politicians and the head of the U.S. Department of Transportation have offered their support to Ohio and Clark County following the derailment Saturday of a Norfolk Southern train.

[ ... ]

More than 20 train cars out of 212 derailed Saturday near the Clark County Fairgrounds where the tracks cross Ohio 41 outside of Springfield. No one was injured in the accident and the cause of the derailment has not been determined.Clark County EMA leaders said there were no known chemicals or hazardous material on the train.“There is no indication of any injuries or risk to public health at this time. A crew from the owner/operator of the railway Norfolk Southern, the Clark County Hazmat team and Ohio Environmental Protection Agency each independently examined the crash site and verified there was no evidence of spillage at the site.”

According to US Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), it’s actually the fourth relatively recent Norfolk Southern derailment in the state. 

“Sandusky, Steubenville, East Palestine, and now Springfield - four Norfolk Southern derailments in less than five months because this corporation has been more concerned with its profit margin than with Ohioans’ safety. Ohio communities should not be forced to live in fear of another disaster. It’s unacceptable - it’s why we must pass my bipartisan Railway Safety Act with Senator Vance, now,” Brown said.

The corporate culture of Norfolk Southern and the orgy of deregulation during the Trump administration have placed safety second to greed.

Tami Abdollah at USA Today pointed out last month:

The railroad industry has cut roughly 30%, or 45,000 total workers since 2015, and since deploying precision scheduled railroading. Norfolk Southern has shed roughly 40% of its 30,456-person workforce. By the end of 2021, the company employed 18,100 workers, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Meanwhile, major railroad operators including Norfolk Southern have paid out $196 billion in buybacks and dividends since 2010, much more than the $150 billion spent on infrastructure improvements during that time, said Martin J. Oberman, chairman of the North American Rail Shippers Association, in a 2021 speech.

These derailments have GREED written all over them.

Bring back safety regulations and HŪGE fines for those who ignore them.

#ohio #norfolk southern #corporate greed #stock buybacks #trump administration #deregulation #derailments #train wrecks #east palestine #springfield #steubenville #sandusky #safety regulations #bring back regulations

[smalltofedsblog]

Stock Buybacks In Defense Companies And How Contract Incentive Structures Can Change The Practice

View On WordPress

#government contracting #Government Contractors #stock buybacks

[plethoraworldatlas]

Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with 2023 revenues of $54 billion, has just been awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in favorable loans.

In addition to badly needed microchips, Intel produces totally useless stock buybacks. On its website the company proudly proclaims to have spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990. That’s not a typo: $152,000,000,000. Which is why I call it "Stock Buybacks Я Us."

Intel took $152 billion of its revenues, some portion of which could have been used for R&D and building new microchip facilities in the U.S. as well as paying workers more, and instead funneled it to its largest Wall Street stockholders and corporate executives, enriching the top fraction of the top one percent.

A company repurchasing its own shares sees earnings per share rise because there are fewer shares in circulation. Share prices rise, though nothing new is made, and the largest stockholders, including top Intel executives, cash out with eye-popping profits. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger hauled in $179 million in 2021, most of it coming from stock-related compensation.

#intel #stock market #Stock buybacks #shareholders

[fspgrad]

Excellent example explaining the greedy practice of corporation stock buybacks. Stock buybacks need to be criminalized....AGAIN.

#stock buybacks #thom hartmann #bed bath and beyond #Youtube

[karadin]

Stock buybacks used to be illegal as a form of stock manipulation, let's bring that back.

#stock buybacks #stock market #wall street vs main street #pay inequity #end stage capitalism

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

BY TIMOTHY NOAH

For years we’ve been hearing about Republican strategies to displace the Democrats as the party of the working class, but conservative efforts to define what that means have always faltered. The main strategy, dating to the Nixon years, has been to use racial and religious prejudice to drive a wedge into what’s left of the New Deal coalition. But “working class” is an economic designation, not a cultural one. In their 2008 book Grand New Party, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam tried to argue that social issues were economic issues, but that’s too facile and sometimes plainly wrong. (What do working-class women gain by losing abortion rights?) In 2021, Representative Jim Banks wrote Representative Kevin McCarthy a memo on how to make the GOP “permanently … the Party of the Working Class.” But apart from hawkishness on trade and immigration, to which Trump had converted the GOP, Banks was silent on economic matters, relying instead on waging culture war.

American Compass was created three years ago to change that. Founded by Oren Cass, a fortyish former Bainie and domestic policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, American Compass is a conservative nonprofit that fashions itself pro-worker. It just produced a manifesto titled Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers that attempts to define a set of conservative economic policies to help the working class. It will host a conference to discuss these on Wednesday afternoon in the Russell Senate Office Building, with remarks from Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, J.D. “Hillbilly Elegy” Vance, and Todd Young.

Rebuilding American Capitalism acknowledges wage stagnation, decries stock buybacks, bemoans financialization, and rejects “market fundamentalism.” It knocks libertarians for disdaining government and mocks Glenn Hubbard, President George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, for stating that “the goal of the economic system [is] optimizing consumption.” It recognizes the serious problem of growing economic inequality. Except for progressives, whom it denounces cartoonishly as disdainful of the private sector and overly “eager to use public programs to provide whatever the market does not,” the manifesto is against the right things. The trouble arises when it’s called upon to be for something—specifically, labor unions.

You can’t be serious about empowering the working class unless you want to strengthen organized labor. Does American Compass want to do that? Yes and no.

Give American Compass credit for including in its manifesto a chapter forthrightly titled “Labor.” Congressional Republicans are so nauseated by this word that whenever they regain control of the House they change the name of the Committee on Education and Labor to the Committee on Education and the Workforce. This revulsion does a disservice to the roughly one-third of union members who reliably vote Republican. Indeed, there’s a conservative argument to make in favor of labor unions, and I’m pleased to see American Compass make it:

“Especially for conservatives, who cherish the role of mediating institutions, prefer private ordering to government dictates, and believe prosperity must be earned rather than redistributed, reforming and reinvigorating the laws that govern organizing and collective bargaining should be an obvious priority.”

Amen. I would add only that Republicans show their true colors by relying, whenever they control the White House, on government power to impede the growth of private-sector unions at the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB.

Also on the plus side, Rebuilding American Capitalism calls for sectoral bargaining, in which labor unions negotiate wages across industry sectors. The United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers established a variation on sectoral bargaining called pattern bargaining back in the 1940s, though its efficacy diminished with the rise of foreign competition. The idea, which is a good one, is that competition within an industry (or its absence) shouldn’t drive down wages.

The section heading “Guarantee Workers’ Legal Right to Organize” got me very excited. But on closer inspection, the manifesto avoided any mention of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, the only serious vehicle right now to shore up labor rights, which has two Republican co-sponsors in the House (Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick and New Jersey’s Christopher Smith), though none, alas, in the Senate. The PRO Act would reverse key anti-labor provisions in the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA, voiding, for instance, state “right-to-work” laws that allow union nonmembers to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining without paying union fees, and legalizing secondary boycotts like the supermarket boycotts that the United Farm Workers’ Cesar Chavez organized during the 1960s to bring grape growers to heel. (Chavez was allowed to target supermarkets that sold grapes only because agricultural workers weren’t covered by the NLRA, and they still aren’t.) The PRO Act would also for the first time allow the NLRB to impose serious monetary penalties on businesses that violate the NLRA; right now all it can do is require payment of back wages and reinstatement of a fired employee, which is why companies violate the act routinely.

How would Rebuilding American Capitalism guarantee workers’ right to organize? By doing, to quote Jake Gittes describing his instructions as a cop patrolling Chinatown (in the great 1974 film of that title), “as little as possible.” The PRO Act would require the NLRB to seek a court injunction to reinstate immediately any employee fired for union organizing. Rebuilding American Capitalism merely advises the NLRB to give its general counsel authority to seek such injunctions—authority the general counsel possesses already, and, under General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, is applying aggressively. Under a Republican president, the energetic pursuit of injunctions is a lot less likely to occur, and a polite request from American Compass will have no effect.

Even worse than its Chinatown approach to protecting workers’ right to organize is Rebuilding America’s section titled “Get Worker Organizations Out of Partisan Politics.” Organized labor’s political influence, even in its current greatly diminished form, is pretty much the only thing it has going for it at a time when private-sector union membership is down to 6%. Unions have always been a force in politics, and it would be suicide for them to withdraw now.

Or perhaps Rebuilding America means only that unions should withdraw from spending directly on political campaigns, something they were barred legally from doing before the Supreme Court turned corporations (and labor unions) into people in 2010’s Citizens United case. “The United States should prohibit political spending by worker organizations,” the manifesto says, “comparable to the prohibition on political spending by 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.” Spending by affiliated PACs would still be permissible. Fine by me—but only if corporations (which take much greater advantage of Citizens United than unions do) are similarly barred from political spending. Which of course would require the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United. Good luck with that. Rebuilding America makes much of the fact that the AFL-CIO and SEIU don’t allow members to dictate how they allocate lobby resources, but neither do corporations allow stockholders to do the same. The prospect of unions disarming unilaterally and leaving politics to corporations doesn’t seem to worry American Compass.

Ultimately, Rebuilding American Capitalism, for all its proletarian posturing, can’t muster much enthusiasm for labor unions. After its very good review early on of the data on growing income inequality, and a less-good section accusing liberals of not supporting apprenticeship programs (not remotely true), the manifesto gives the game away by stating that “although most Americans … wish they had more opportunities for their voice to be heard” in the workplace, “the traditional labor union is not the model they prefer.” Oh, please. Anybody who’s paid the slightest attention knows that labor unions enjoy more public support today than they have in half a century. It’s inconceivable that the authors of Rebuilding American Capitalism don’t know this.

To justify its claim that workers don’t especially like unions, Rebuilding American Capitalism cites polling data (from a poll conducted by American Compass) that says 63% would prefer a “worker organization” (whatever that is) to be run by labor and management, as opposed to 37% who would prefer it to be run solely by workers. This is a testament not to any wariness of unions on the public’s part but to the public’s naïveté about American management’s willingness to cooperate with labor. It’s different in Europe, of course, where they have works councils and other organizations where these things get hashed out by labor, management, and the government. American corporations rejected this model after World War II, when Walter Reuther and other union leaders proposed it. If they could now be persuaded otherwise, that would be lovely. But after reading American Compass’s manifesto, I wouldn’t trust any conservative to write the enabling legislation. Rebuilding American Capitalism has some good ideas about what ails America, but it balks at furnishing the means to fix it.

#us politics #the new republic #Timothy Noah #op eds #2023 #republicans #conservatives #gop policy #gop platform #gop #American Compass #Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers #working class #working class solidarity #workers #union workers #worker's rights #wage stagnation #stock buybacks #financialization #market fundamentalism #lolbertarians #libertarians #progressives #organized labor #labor unions #National Labor Relations Board #Protecting the Right to Organize Act #National Labor Relations Act

[thoughtportal]

#GM #stock buybacks #unions #labor vs capital #workers vs capital #lying liars who lie

[worldofwardcraft]

The big buyback boondoggle.

Prior to the late 1970s, profitable corporations typically retained their excess earnings and reinvested them in order to increase their capabilities, often by rewarding with bonuses and higher wages the employees who made them more competitive. In those days, buying back your own stock, reducing the amount of shares outstanding, and thereby raising your company's share price, was considered stock manipulation. And was totally illegal. That is, until the disaster of the Reagan presidency.

In 1982, St. Ronnie's SEC adopted Rule 10b-18, that exempted a company from being charged with manipulating its stock price when it repurchased shares. Which opened wide the floodgates for abuse. Especially because stock increasingly made up the majority of the compensation for corporate executives. As the Harvard Business Review pointed out as far back as 2014,

Since the late 1980s, the largest component of the income of the top 0.1% has been compensation, driven by stock-based pay. Meanwhile, the growth of workers’ wages has been slow and sporadic.

But it was the misnamed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (it provided massive tax cuts to corporations but didn't create any jobs) that really set off an explosion in share repurchases. Republicans touted it as a mechanism to spur investment and stimulate the economy. Yet all it stimulated was the stock market.

Flush with cash due to their greatly reduced taxes, US corporations went on a madcap stock-buying spree. Like companies such as Johnson & Johnson (which repurchased $5 billion of its common stock), Meta Platforms/Facebook ($40 billion), Procter & Gamble ($4 billion), Lowe's ($4 billion), Comcast ($45 billion), Cigna ($26 billion), Walmart ($65 billion), Morgan Stanley ($12 billion last year; $9 billion the year before), plus a host of others.

In fact, Bloomberg recently reported that American firms announced a record $1.26 trillion in stock buybacks last year. And according to US News, S&P 500 companies repurchased a total of $210.8 billion of their own shares in the third quarter of 2022 alone. This included 319 companies that reported at least $5 million in buybacks.

Robert Reich, President Clinton's Secretary of Labor, is undoubtedly correct when he says,

Stock buybacks don’t create more jobs. They don't increase wages. They don’t grow the economy. They do one thing: Make corporate execs richer.

Rather than investing in the economy or their employees, corporate bosses are lining their own pockets with buybacks — creating a false impression that a higher stock price reflects an increase in the company's value. Or, in other words, perpetrating a fraud.

#stock buybacks #executive compensation #republican tax bill

[dylsexai]

It’s wild that a publicly traded company can announce layoffs due to “tough economic conditions” and then be allowed to buy back billions worth of their own stocks! Like how is this not price manipulation?

#corruption #capitalism #america #stocks #stock buybacks #share price #market manipulation