Jerry Useem has an insightful piece on stock-buybacks. The broader insight is about how Wall Street has altered the original idea of corporations beyond recognition. Back in the '80s when corporate raiders began attacking and breaking up companies, an economist named Michael C. Jensen argued that a corporation's primary duty was to its shareholders. Previously, corporations were seen as having multiple constituencies: shareholders, the community, the people who worked there. Jensen's argument was that if a company was too weak or debt ridden, it allowed the raiders to come in and destroy the company, which benefitted no one but the raiders.
Over time, MBA America took this lesson and ran with it. Because a corporation was supposed to prioritize the stockholder, it made sense to incentivize the senior management by giving them stock options. LOTS of them.
The Trump Tax Cut plowed billions of dollars back onto corporate balance sheets. This money has been used primarily for stock-buybacks. This has allowed for unprecedented (and potentially legal) insider trading. Useem mentions the case of the CEO of Home Depot, Craig Menear, who used stock buybacks to increase his compensation from $11.4 million to $41 million.
None of this has made Home Depot a "better" company. As Useem notes, the median salary for a worker at Home Depot is $23,000 a year.
It's complicated in some ways, but the basic idea that Trump and every single member of the GOP made millionaires richer while ignoring workers - most of them likely whites without college degrees - is another way to attack the GOP.
The corrupt part is that it's not corrupt.
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