She also made $29,000,000 in 2022 for herself, cause she worked so hard and made so many cars herself. Ha
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.
The problem is toxic anti-capitalism
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.
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.
Keep these CEO memes coming. These assholes need to have a spotlight shown on them. A company is not a person, a company is ran by people.
They’re laughing all the way to the bank. The have not one care for what you or I think of them
They do if we threaten their pockets or their lives.
Historically, which one is targeted is their choice.
I’ve heard eating them works too.
I’d rather steal from them. There’s a Brazilian saying, “A thief that steals from a thief has 100 years of forgiveness”
We have the same saying in Spanish, but it’s 1000 in our case, so if you steal do it in Rodrigo Montoya way :)
Only one has ever really gotten their attention. They can always make more money.
Fucking hell people here on lemmy are batshit insane.
Pick a time in history where there was violent upheaval of working people. Tell me who they targeted first.
You are calling for people’s deaths. That is a punishable offense and makes you batshit insane.
No. I’m highlighting that, historically, angry poor people have killed callous rich people.
It’s naive to not recognise it will happen again.
You have about as much plausible deniability here as someone saying “watch out mr president, a lot of presidents have been assasinated in the past”.
Should name the companies as well.
And the share holders
Just replace ceos with AI lol
Seriously, a lot of CEOs and most managers could be much more easily replaced by AI than the workers. Run some analysis on some metrics lay off people based on that. Go over the market analytics, direct staff to work on derivative versions of the products that have good numbers, cancel products that don’t. I’m not even sure if you really need AI for this, a very basic script could handle a lot of it.
Of course a program would be lacking in the common sense to say “Nobody is going to drop a week’s pay so they can go into a virtual world where they’re a poorly drawn legless cartoon character”. But present day CEOs make these mistakes anyway. It wouldn’t be good, but it wouldn’t be worse than the status quo.
A tale as old as mankind. Like 20 years ago I saw a movie. Some indie thing from France or Spain. The kind of shit that gets highly acclaimed at the Cannes film festival. In one scene there was a bricklayer reciting a poem (from the top of my head and loosely translated from German):
My grandfather was a bricklayer. My father was a bricklayer. I am a bricklayer, too. But, tell me, where is my house?
That allways stuck with me.
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me 'cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
The devil put the coal in the ground
Devil put the coal in the ground
He buried it deep so it’d never be found
Devil put the coal in the ground
I did some brain jogging and I think in German it went like this:
Mein Vater war ein Maurer. Sein Vater war ein Maurer. Auch ich mauere Tag ein Tag aus. Doch sag mir, wo steht mein Haus?
Which would translate to
My father was a bricklayer. His father was a bricklayer. I, too, wall up day in and day out. But tell me, where is my house?
But I can’t figure out what the movie was.
Stock buy backs used to be illegal in the USA. It was seen as a form of corruption.
It’s blatant stock manipulation. The stock price goes up because they increase demand for the stock for no reason. The value of the company doesn’t change at all other than they’re holding stock as an asset instead of the cash. Yet the stock is worth more now. It’s stock manipulation, plain and simple.
It’s almost as if stocks are a really shitty way to get rich from nothing.
: “It’s not corruption if you legalize it!”When organized labor is weak and non-militant, capital can get away with a lot more, so it does get away with a lot more.
It strips away anti-corruption, regulations, and social democracy as soon as it can get away with it.
I approve of this series of memes. Please continue.
But…but it’s politics! Surely politics must always be 50/50 divisive, and not be based around universal assmunchers that any sane person should agree is an asshole?
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They could’ve paid for all of the UAW’s asks and then some with just that but it’s less about the money and more about trying to look strong. The reality is they are nothing without their workers, no company is.
Just like how the losses the entertainment industry has suffered due to the writers and actors strike could have paid for their demands 10 times over. This is 100% about stripping the power from workers and keeping the power in the C suite.
I wonder if the companies were expecting a recession to strengthen their hand. Turns out, we don’t need them.
Gotta keep them (us) peons in their (our) place!
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You dont talk about Fight Club.
Very cool. Very very cool.
Put laws on the books and hold people accountable. That’s what laws are supposed to do.
“Buy some laws and force them to fuck everyone but me, gotcha”
I’m loving all these billionaire memes, call them tf out
“But if you shared that money among all workers, they’d only get an extra 50 cents per hour!!!” - some tool defending corporate profit
$3.4B / 167000 workers / 2000 hours = $10.18/hr raise, which is quite substantial.
True, but that would only be for one year. What about after that? Take the raise away? They don’t do $3.4b stock buy backs every year I imagine.
That’s just the exorbitant profit that they put into stock buy backs. And if they spent half of that on buybacks and gave every employee a 10k bonus I’m sure opinions of them would be a lot more favourable.
They could easily cut back some of their “profit” to pay people better
Yes, I don’t disagree that it should have gone to employees, just wanted to be clear that $10 an hour wasn’t quite accurate. I’m sure a one time yearly bonus would be just as much appreciated and needed.
They also paused stock dividends for COVID 3 years ago and only resumed it now at 9¢ instead of 38¢
And their 2022 gross profit was nearly 21 billion dollars. That’s an extra 60 dollars an hour for every employee
They have the money.
They don’t do $3.4b stock buy backs every year I imagine.
No… but they could give everyone a $2/hr raise, which isn’t trivial, and sustain themselves at that level for FIVE YEARS on the current excess.
Another option is to give everyone a bonus; doing the math on 3.4bn/167k workers, is around 20k each; even if they “only” gave half of that back to the workers, a $10k bonus is pretty nice and one-time. There’s no excuse…
If stock buybacks are Capital’s path of least resistance it will self organize, like iron shavings to a neodymium magnet, and make it happen. There is no human agency in the circuits of capitalism and never will be.
If this woman tried to not do stock buybacks, she would be fired by her peers/board and replaced.
If this woman was even capable of considering doing pay raises instead of stock buybacks, she would have been clocked and removed from the circuit like an intelligent species crashing into the fermi paradox/great filter.
They’re all plotting something.
They just want to maintain their status quo, humanity be damned.
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