By Steve Denning “The pro-business journal, The Economist, last week declared in two articles (here and here) that “blue chips are engaged in their own kind of financial excess: a dangerous addiction to share buy-backs.” Share buybacks “have become a kind of corporate…
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Value extractors, “:super-managers,” vampires and the decline of the US and US health care
By Roy Poses “Appearing during the last few weeks were a series of articles that tied the decline of the US economy to huge systemic problems with leadership and governance of large organizations. While the articles were not focused on…
Explaining the failure of WV’s corporate tax cuts to produce prosperity
By Sean O’Leary “In this month’s Harvard Business Review, William Lazonick writes in an article titled “Profits Without Prosperity“, that between 2003 and 2012 companies in the Fortune 500 “used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back…
The madness of share-buybacks; The flawed shareholder-driven model
By Bernard Hickey “Here’s my Top 10 items from around the Internet over the last week or so. As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz. See all previous Top 10s here.”… [Click HERE to…
ROOM for DEBATE: Pocketing Profits or Reinvesting Them
U.S. corporate profits abound, but for most Americans prosperity can’t be found. Open-market repurchases, aka stock buybacks, are central to the problem. For 2004-2013, 454 companies in the S&P 500 Index expended 51% of their profits, or $3.4 trillion, on repurchases, on…
Pocketing Profits or Reinvesting Them (debate on William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity”)
Online feature “Corporations have gone from retaining about 60 percent of their profits in the 1970s, to about 10 percent today, William Lazonick wrote in a recent Harvard Business Review article. Profits are instead being used to pay dividends to investors…
Greed in the Executive Suite?
Financial Advisors “Deciding how to allocate capital is one of management’s most important responsibilities. Such decisions impact not only the company’s short- and long-term performance, but the overall economy as well.”… [Click HERE to read the full article]
The overpaid CEO
By Susan Holmberg and Mark Schmitt “The compensation of American executives—CEOs and their “C-suite” colleagues—has long been a matter of controversy, especially recently, as the wages of average workers have stagnated and economic inequality has moved to the center of…
How business leaders turned into vampires
By Steve Denning “How did America—a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—become one of the most unequal countries on the planet? Why do the nation’s leaders now spend so much of their time feeding at…
Why the economy doesn’t work for the 99%: Massive payouts to corporate stockholders
By Liz Iacobucci “Wondering what happened to America’s Middle Class? UMass Lowell professor William Lazonick has some numbers for you. Since 2004, top US corporations have paid 86% of their net income to stockholders through dividends and stock buybacks. Why that’s important: Money…
