On 4/3/2021 8:37 AM, ⁹⁹⁹√ wrote:
> это на самомделе scary shit, потому что clearly not sustainable
The standard defense of firms returning so much capital rather than
investing it is that this allows the resources to reach their best use.
If managers believe they can “maximize shareholder value” by disgorging
cash, they should do so. The recipients, in pursuit of higher returns,
will then invest it elsewhere. “The investor either buys some other
stock or invests in some other business that actually needs the money,”
explained Kevin Hassett, chairman of President Trump’s Council of
Economic Advisers. “The money is reinvested and is increasing the
efficiency of the economy by moving cash to the firms that need it the
most.”
This fails in both principle and practice. As American Affairs editor
Julius Krein has observed, if $1 trillion in annual buybacks indicates
that “there are in fact no better investments to be made, and the
corporate sector simply has no use for this vast sum,” then this “calls
into question the viability of the free market capitalist system itself.
After all, the entire social justification of free enterprise is that
the private sector is the most capable of finding productive investments
and deploying capital effectively.” It is a dereliction of duty for the
managers of a profitable firm to claim they have no productive uses for
their profits and so must hand them over for someone else to invest,
especially when they do so as their own firm loses its competitive
advantage or consumes its capital stock.
The maneuver also initiates a sordid game of hot potato—I don’t want to
invest this; here, you do it. In Hassett’s imagination, the shareholders
to whom the profits return are themselves investors who can deploy the
capital productively. That’s not reality. When a public company hands
back capital to the financial markets, it throws the resources over an
invisible wall, from the land of investors who might deploy it
productively to the land of non-investors who are unlikely to do so. The
non-investor may choose to convert the capital into personal investment
or consumption, buying that bigger boat, say, or else turn around and
non-invest in some other asset. Perhaps with the cash they receive when
Intel buys back its own shares, they purchase shares of Boeing. But they
have not invested in Boeing, merely given the cash to someone else who
once held the shares. I don’t want to invest this; here, you do it.