Corporate stock buybacks are management enrichment devices that are nothing more than speculation, often with borrowed money. What could go wrong? From William Lazonick, Mustafa Erdem Sakinç and Matt Hopkins at hbr.org:
Even as the United States continues to experience its longest economic expansion since World War II, concern is growing that soaring corporate debt will make the economy susceptible to a contraction that could get out of control. The root cause of this concern is the trillions of dollars that major U.S. corporations have spent on open-market repurchases — aka “stock buybacks” — since the financial crisis a decade ago. In 2018 alone, with corporate profits bolstered by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, companies in the S&P 500 Index did a combined $806 billion in buybacks, about $200 billion more than the previous record set in 2007. The $370 billion in repurchases which these companies did in the first half of 2019 is on pace for total annual buybacks that are second only to 2018. When companies do these buybacks, they deprive themselves of the liquidity that might help them cope when sales and profits decline in an economic downturn.
Making matters worse, the proportion of buybacks funded by corporate bonds reached as high as 30% in both 2016 and 2017, according to JPMorgan Chase. The International Monetary Fund’s Global Financial Stability Report, issued in October, highlights “debt-funded payouts” as a form of financial risk-taking by U.S. companies that “can considerably weaken a firm’s credit quality.”
