From 2014 through the start of 2018, corporate profits declined. The one-time spike in profits after 2018 was due to the corporate tax cut. Essentially, without the corporate tax cut, the corporate sector has seen virtually no profit growth since 2014.
When Does It Make Sense for Corporations to Take on Debt?
It can make sense for a company to leverage retained earnings with debt to finance investment in productive capabilities that may eventually yield product revenues and corporate profits. Taking on debt to finance buybacks, however, is bad management, given that no revenue-generating investments are made that can allow the company to pay off the debt.
HBR: The Costs of Stock Buybacks in a Downturn
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.
Why Stock Buybacks Are Dangerous for the Economy
In the Harvard Business Review, William Lazonick, Mustafa Erdem Sakinç, and Matt Hopkins write:
Why have U.S. companies done these massive buybacks? With the majority of their compensation coming from stock options and stock awards, senior corporate executives have used open-market repurchases to manipulate their companies’ stock prices to their own benefit and that of others who are in the business of timing the buying and selling of publicly listed shares. Buybacks enrich these opportunistic share sellers — investment bankers and hedge-fund managers as well as senior corporate executives — at the expense of employees, as well as continuing shareholders.
Trump news – live: Tucker Carlson said Trump was ‘demonic force’ after 2020 election, Fox News lawsuit shows
The Independent says:
“He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” Carlson texted his Fox News producers, according to court filings in the Dominion defamation case. He called Mr Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer,” adding, “But he’s not going to destroy us.”
Biden officials weighing civil penalties in Ohio’s toxic rail disaster
Politico said:
On Thursday, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy took to Twitter to insist that “even if the rule had gone into effect, this train wouldn’t have had ECP brakes” because it would have “applied ONLY to HIGH HAZARD FLAMMABLE TRAINS.”
Wall Street Is DESTROYING The American Dream | Breaking Points w/James Li
James Li said that Wall Street is gobbling up the housing market and killing the chance for most Americans to own a home.
They are telling regular Americans that buying homes is a bad investment while simultaneously spending billions of their own dollars buying up the exact same homes presumably because they see it as a great investment
Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”
In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, there is a mini-story about The Grand Inquisitor. Here’s a quote from the PDF:
Alyosha stood up, went over to him in silence, and gently kissed him on the lips.
We’re no longer in Walter Cronkite days. The consequence is people don’t agree on facts.
In a January 24, 2020 interview discussing her new book “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America“, Investigative Reporter Carol Leonnig, responded to a question about the cost of the Trump circus and lies.
Leonnig says:
We’re no longer in Walter Cronkite days. The consequence is people don’t agree on facts. And Phil and I have an extra job in addition to bringing you facts and that extra job is something the Post also takes really seriously with is now we got to show you how we made the cake. We’ve got to show you how we did the reporting or else you’re not going to believe us. And that’s our new chore.
Kenneth Cukier: Big data changes the nature of the problem
Kenneth Cukier says that the improvements in many areas, including self-driving cars, are not driven by faster computers or faster algorithms.
The improvement is possible because big-data has allowed us to change the nature of the problem:
We changed the nature of the problem from one in which we tried to overtly and explicitly explain to the computer how to drive to one in which we say, “Here’s a lot of data around the vehicle. You figure it out.