this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Stock buybacks need to be made illegal again. I don’t understand how it’s anything other than market manipulation.
Ronald Regan really fucked this nation over. . .
He’s was the first paid actor, just a puppet so the people in control can remain unknown. Skull and bones secret society was/is a real thing.
It’s not a secret, we know who the billionaires are that are funding this madness, but the only people that could put a stop to it, are the ones benefiting from them.
So we'll have to eat them for real.
The announcement of the first TRILLIONAIRE should cause a worldwide civil war.
Nixon never should have been pardoned
Shareholder primacy was from the Henry Ford days.
It makes sense if they're pulling out of the stock market entirely, in that case it's just settling the books. Any other reason is to manipulate the price. The whole stock market is a house of cards controlled directly by a few self-titled elites though, so chicanery is literally built in and always was.
I agree. I could live with it if it were merely a way to defer taxes, but the U.S. has something called the stepped-up basis. This allows people to inherit stocks without paying tax on the capital gains. The wealthy can live their whole lives without paying any tax. Both stock buy-backs and the stepped-up basis severely undermine the stock market and tax system.
The real parasites in society.
Thank you. And amazing to see you have positive upvotes.
Whenever someone makes a comment like this on reddit, an army of accounts would appear to downvote and argue against it.
I'm convinced the narrative on reddit is highly controlled on these kind of topics.
Either that, or the retards of WSB were the culprits and they haven't found their way to lemmy yet.
Now that I think of it, perhaps those same accounts were used to manipulate retail traders on WSB... hmmm..
I am an MBA and agree that buybacks are fine. The problem is toxic anti-capitalism from my perspective. People are not really educated well on these topics. I find your comment funny that an army of accountants come to explain things and help everyone understand the nuances and why this is needed, but all the experts are somehow shills.
It's not like capitalism is doing itself (or the 99%) any favors. When it's blatantly clear that the ultra rich and short-term profit seeking are responsible for a lot of world problems (extreme pollution, climate change, corruption, being essentially immune to most laws), being "toxic anti-capitalist" is a natural step.
Capitalism also funded the innovations that enabled us to have this conversion.
That was probably more valid before WW2. Afterwards, it's mostly government (military) spending and financing that really funded the innovations we're using today, at least regarding computers and electronics
The modern PC was developed in a garage. Linux was a pet project. Uber and many other companies was funded by the previous success of another app. The owner sold StumbleUpon to eBay for $75M then used that money to make a killer rideshare app. SpaceX, Tesla, Streaming media. I beg to differ on whether most innovation is government funded. There are thousands of entrepreneurs that prove you wrong on that point.
The USA version of a modern PC, overseas the brits were fiddling with their own versions. It was only possible because the govt spent loads of money financing companies into creating electronics. If not for the USA govt needs and the competition arising from that, its unlikely Silicon Valley would be what it is today, and Steves Wozniak and Jobs probably wouldn't have access to cheap chips.
Of a university student, not an entrepreneur, and something he did because he didn't want to pay for a license of MINIX, not for financial gain.
Is a piece of shit that just tacked together existing technologies and abused a completely unregulated space to grow and dominate the market.
Wouldn't exist if the USA gov't didn't get its shit together after the initial successes of the URSS's space program. Look how long it took until private companies began bothering with space without direct funding from a government.
Most of them relying either directly or indirectly on the shoulders of gov't funded innovation that likely wouldn't have happened otherwise, especially any company dealing with space. The internet would either have taken longer to develop or be much different without the ARPA Net as a forerunner, for instance. Most of its innovation afterwards came from universities, not entrepreneurs. More often than not, entrepreneurs take existing technologies and find a way to profit on top of them.
Pricing together existing technologies to create new innovations is exactly how things have always worked. We stand on the shoulder of giants. It is the reason why many discoveries happen simultaneously in different parts of the world. Because the latest understanding and tools available make the next innovation possible. Saying that Uber is shit for making a GPS enabled app that can act as a commissioned merchant service is like saying anyone that uses AWS is a bad company because they don’t host their own servers. SpaceX filling in a government void is a great entrepreneur story and puts the scope on how significant government overspending is. The internet would have come about even without ARPANET. University labs were already messing around with these systems and were all working towards transmission protocols.
The main reason I called Uber shit was this:
And I didn't even mention how they began fucking their "partners" (drivers) after their place was consolidated. Not too different from what Amazon did for years to grow into "the" online marketplace despite competition.
When I said that capitalism doesn't do itself any favors, the reasoning was mainly that. Any innovations or "innovations" are beside the point when the companies and people with a certain amount of money can simply bend the rules to their will. The Microsoft antitrust case in the late 90s became a nothingburger. FacebookMeta after the Cambridge Analytica scandal turned into nothing. Amazon can probably buy its way out of a possible antitrust suit, which is still "being considered". There's a reason people joke about "finger wagging" and "wrist slapping" being the biggest punishment the rich ever get
Sorry for the late reply. Busy week being a slave to the system. Need to work hard to play hard though.
Uber did exactly what it should have. It tapped into a blue ocean, creating a brand new vertical in a stale market. This is capitalism at its best, bringing something innovative and useful into the world.
They never presented the gig economy as a career path. It’s a side hustle. Anyone complaining that they can’t feed their family off it is missing the point. It was meant to be something that you do with your car in between jobs for some extra spending money.
I agree that we have an issue with those in power not enforcing market regulation. Plato predicted this too. These are not new concepts by any means. He also said that redistribution of wealth doesn’t work either. His utopian society was a bit wired though. I don’t like the part where no one owns anything.
If anything we need a reset of congressional term limits. That alone might help get more interesting people into politics.
It's very obviously is. Stock buybacks aren't allowed almost anywhere else in the world for a reason. It just leads to terrible behavior. This coupled with insanely low effective corporate tax rates means companies horde capital and do buybacks instead of doing other activities that are more economically beneficial to the country. Like increasing worker pay...
If I'm being honest, I don't understand this angle. Why are stock buybacks immoral or wrong? Isn't it simply using extra cash in a company to buy back stock from shareholders? With the same demand and reduced total stock, of course the price is going to go up. But the total market capitalization remains the same. I don't understand why this is somehow wrong. Can someone help me out?
Because executive pay is largely given in shares, so it incentivizes the leadership to invest funds in buy backs to inflate the price of the very shares they own instead of investing that money into employee pay or other company centric initiatives.
The other reply is correct regarding the macro effects of the practise. The more immediate issue is that it allows shareholders to avoid paying dividend taxes. So they can effectively defer paying taxes until they realise any capital gains. This is a huge benefit, as the present value of money is worth much more than the future value of money. However there is an even larger benefit in the U.S. Dependents can inherit stocks at the current price and avoid paying any capital gains tax. This is called the “stepped-up basis.” It’s an insane tax loophole. Together stock buy-backs and the stepped-up basis allow the ultra wealthy to pay little to no tax, ever. They take out perpetual loans to pay for living expenses, guaranteed against their holdings.
I agree. They need to do a reverse split if they want to change the shares in circulation.
The idea was a company could show faith by buying their own stock. Now ceo pay is tied to factors associated with the stock that can be manipulated by buying it back.
The IBM bro Ginny made millions while the company shrunk by manipulating the stock.
I don’t care what a ceo makes. I do care what they do. If they’re only focusing on themselves, I care.