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Comment by grandinj | Hacker News Reader

If they hadn't used stock buybacks, they would have issued dividends, and we would be in the same situation.

Except for all those companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway that are sitting on $100B+ cash reserves each [1].

The idea a business might be prepared to weather cyclical downturns doesn't seem that unusual to me? Seems more like competent management?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/07/microsoft-apple-and-alphabet...

Buybacks are worse because so much of it has not been financed with cash, but cheap debt from issuing corporate bonds which are now at risk of default.

It’s weird that paying out dividends from borrowed money is not ok but doing buybacks is.

So then the real problem is the debt, most likely that US corporate debt is given special tax treatment.

Borrowing for tax purposes is sort of a perpetuated myth. Firms in zero tax nations have debt, and firms in the US prior to corporate taxes had debt. Debt is first a foremost a way of financing corporate activities.

This seems like one of the core problems to me.

I don't necessarily think that companies should be banned from ever doing stack buybacks when they have sufficient cash (for some definition of sufficient), but allowing companies to take on debt to do stock buybacks seems asinine, both on the part of the company doing the buyback, and the creditor lending them the money to do it.

Any company doing so should be the last one to receive a public bailout; so maybe regulations should be targeted to industries deemed too critical to fail, such as airlines.

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