“All those billions are not just going into the air, they are going into someone’s pocket.”
[Editor’s Note: One of the business experts interviewed warns we are at grave risk of yet another financial meltdown on the scale of what we experienced in 2008. — Mark L. Taylor]
Business Daily / BBC (8/16/19)
Share buybacks are when a publicly-listed company uses some of its spare cash to buy up shares in itself, in order to drive the share price up and benefit shareholders. The practice has become so common that the amount of buyback money extracted from corporations exceeds their profits.
Stock buybacks have totaled $4 trillion in the last nine years; more than all the other investor activity on Wall Street … combined.
Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, explains how stock buybacks emerged. But are stock buybacks a good idea? Is it perhaps better to use that money to grow the business in other ways? And crucially, with so many executives paid in shares, is this just a way for them to maximise their own take?
Nell Minnow of Value Edge explains why she thinks buybacks are ripe for abuse. But Ken Bertsch, Executive Director of the Council of Institutional Investors says buybacks don’t need to be totally reined in, but can be used for good.
Link to Story and 17-Minute Audio
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Anand Giridharadas: A New Form Of Bait-N-Switch — How Billionaires Prevent Social Change By Pretending To Support Change
“A call to arms to regular people to take change back from millionaire and billionaires.”
Rising / The Hill (8/3/19)
Krystal Ball interviews Author Anand Giridharadas on his book “Winners Take All.” Anand explains how the same billionaires who undermined the American Dream now want us to be dependent on them as our saviors.