VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow is quoted in this Atlantic story about buybacks. Today, another effort is under way to raid corporate assets at the expense of employees, investors, and taxpayers. But this time, the attack isn’t coming from the outside. It’s coming from inside the citadel, perpetrated by the very chieftains who are supposed…

Between 2003 and 2007, [Harvard professor William] Lazonick noted that the number of stock buybacks among companies in the S. & P. 500 quadrupled. Then, when the financial crisis began, some of these same banks required billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to avoid collapse. In September, 2008, just after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy (after…

Our research, based on publicly available information, strongly suggests that the dedication of Boeing’s senior executives to increasing their company’s profits and stock yield—which also augmented their own compensation—resulted in management decisions that contributed to the two 737 MAX crashes. While much more information remains to be discovered, the reported evidence, still unfolding almost daily,…

We note that the second sentence should begin with an “and,” not a “but.” The artificial inflation of stock prices via buybacks is by definition a short term boost and a trick that cannot be endlessly repeated. We have discussed this in detail many times and will continue to raise our concerns. Buybacks have gotten…

You know the rule: Buy low, sell high. Public companies, it seems, haven’t learned this basic investing lesson. They’re buying back more of their own shares than ever before: In 2018, on the heels of tax reform, the amount of buybacks surpassed $1 trillion in a year for the first time ever. While the amount…