By William Lazonick “U.S. corporate profits abound, but for most Americans, prosperity can’t be found. Open-market repurchases — stock buybacks — are central to the problem. From 2004 to 2013, 454 companies in the S&P 500 Index expended 51 percent of…
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Why big corporations would rather waste billions of dollars than give it to workers
By Bryce Covert “The amount of money large American companies spent on buying back their own stock to prop up their share prices just hit a record high. Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index spent $104.3 billion on planned…
Economist proves: Reagan’s deregulation caused today’s income inequality
Anonymous “Finally, the root cause is revealed. Plenty of talk has been talked on the topic, by experts, data wonks, and politicians. But nobody was able to say why the 1% started f***ing the rest of us to an even greater extent than hitherto, from the 80’s through…
Economic Hegemony and the Federal Reserve
By Rob Urie “In his book Globalization and Its Discontents former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz details the ignominious history of IMF ‘structural adjustment’ programs inflicted around the globe in the 1990s. While the IMF has admitted that economic austerity is both theoretically flawed…
Corporate borrowing now flows to shareholders, not productive investment: Study
Owen Davis “Why do companies take on debt? The conventional answer is that they need to invest: to hire more workers, upgrade facilities or invent new widgets. But fresh research shows that in the past three decades corporations increasingly borrow…
An economist identified the corporate behavior that led to our staggering inequalit
By Gary Cohn “There are many gauges of the depth and breadth of economic inequality, and they often measure what middle-income working people have today against what they had prior to 1980 – that time when homes were affordable, along…
Top five California companies driving inequality
By Gary Cohn “Economist William Lazonick caused a stir last year when the Harvard Business Review printed his critique of corporate America, Profits Without Prosperity. In it, Lazonick extensively analyzed data that showed how the country’s largest companies were exacerbating…
New study says California tech giants stock buybacks are fueling our income inequalit
By Andre Bourque “A new study published in an article by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Gary Cohn, are based on the research of former Harvard economist William Lazonick. Lazonick examines how large, publicly traded companies spending a significant portion of…
The seven deadly sins of activist hedge funds
By Steve Denning “Activist hedge funds, writes The Economist in its cover story of February 7, 2015, are “a breath of fresh air” and “good for the public company.” They offer firms a “new lease on life.” They are “a…
The evil of stock buybacks: How corporations became ATMs for the superwealthy
By Jeff Spross “To appreciate the rot at the heart of corporate America, look no further than stock buybacks. Otherwise known as repurchases, they’re instances in which corporations use their profits to buy back their own stocks, resulting in a…
