While we are at it, why are we having to bailout large corporations, etc for their poor money decisions?
Tiabbi
It’s hard to overstate how much money has vanished. S&P 500 companies overall spent the size of the recent bailout – $2 trillion – on buybacks
just in the last three years!
Banks spent $155 billion on buybacks and dividends across a 12-month period in 2019-2020. As former FDIC chief Sheila Bair
pointed out last month, “as a rule of thumb $1 of capital supports $16 of lending.” So, $155 billion in buybacks and dividends translates into roughly $2.4 trillion in lending that didn’t happen.
Most all of the sectors receiving aid through the new CARES Act programs moved huge amounts to shareholders in recent years. The big four airlines – Delta, United, American, and Southwest – spent $
43.7 billion on buybacks just since 2012. If that sum sounds familiar, it’s because it equals almost exactly the size of the $
50 billion bailout airlines are being given as part of the CARES Act relief package.
The two major federal financial rescues, in 2008-2009 and now, have become an important part of a cover story shifting attention from all this looting: the public has been trained to think companies have been crippled by investment losses, when the biggest drain has really come via a relentless program of intentional extractions.
Corporate officers treat their own companies like mob-owned restaurants or strip mines, to be systematically pillaged for value using buybacks as the main extraction tool. During this period corporations laid off masses of workers they could afford to keep, begged for bailouts and federal subsidies they didn’t need, and issued mountains of unnecessary debt, essentially to pay for accelerated shareholder distributions.
All this was done in service of a lunatic religion of “maximizing shareholder value.” “MSV” by now has been proven a moronic canard – even onetime shareholder icon Jack Welch said ten years ago it was “
the dumbest idea in the world” – and it’s had the result of promoting a generation of corporate leaders who are skilled at firing people, hustling public subsidies, and borrowing money to fund stock awards for themselves, but apparently know jack about anything else.
During a Covid-19 crisis where we need corporations to innovate and deliver life-saving goods and services, this is suddenly a major problem. “We’re seeing, these people don’t have the slightest idea of how to run their own companies,” says University of Massachusetts economist William Lazonick, whose
substantial research on the buyback issue has been a cornerstone of the movement toward reform.