By Chuck Epstein “In the 1960s, the sale of clear plastic ant farms was a popular gift for kids. The ant farms came complete with ants, a packet of sand and a clear plastic rectangular container that was placed on…
AIR IMPACT
Recognition of AIR research, opinions, and people in the media and elsewhere
Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer’s surprising collaboration — and weird proposal — on stock buybacks
By David Dayen “Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders went to the same high school in Brooklyn, but that’s about all they shared in common until an op-ed in Monday’s New York Times. The subject is stock buybacks, the increasingly common procedure whereby public companies…
Apple blew $9 billion buying back its own stock. There’s a lesson here
By Jordan Weissmann “Corporate America spent much of this year celebrating the tax cut that Republicans handed them by dumping truckloads of money onto their investors. Mostly, they did this by spending record amounts of money on stock buybacks.”… [Click HERE to read the…
America has the highly combustible economy it deserves
By Marshall Auerback “It’s part of the American experience to find yourself in an elevator, in an airplane terminal, or at home, looking at a screen with stock numbers whizzing by, and people yammering about how America is somewhere on…
Stock buybacks are a parasite on the US economy
By Jan D Weir “Last month, Sears, the giant retailer that was a shoppers icon for 125 years, filed for bankruptcy showing an unmanageable $5 billion in debt. Since 2005, under the leadership of former Goldman Sachs trader and Wall…
The ghost of clinical trials past, present, and future; Have you seen many paradigm shifts lately?
By David Connelly “What is more tiring for anyone in this industry to hear? Is it the most oft-quoted statistic from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development that the average cost of getting a drug developed through…
GM bought back $10 billion in stock since 2015, double what job cuts will save
By Irina Ivanova “When General Motors announced it was cutting up to 14,000 jobs and idling five automotive plants, it justified the massive cuts by citing long-term savings. The cuts would free up $6 billion in cash, for a net…
Apple’s world-beating financial engineering is teaching the corporate world how to exploit Trump’s tax cuts
By Cory Doctorow “After Trump’s tax-cuts and forgiveness program, Apple repatriated $260 billion it had stashed in offshore tax havens (or, more truthfully, had funneled through offshore tax-havens to buy onshore financial products that were notionally held offshore); this made…
Apple and many other tech giants have Wall Street disease
By Marshall Auerback “The boom witnessed in the U.S. equity market over the past few years has begun to echo the latter stages of the high tech bubble of the early 2000s, right down to the investor interest ultimately gravitating…
Unemployment and the markets
By Shareholders Unite “Most of the great Trump stock rally was based on the prospect of, and the implementation of tax cuts, more in particular corporate tax cuts. The benefits are obvious, corporations paying less tax on their earnings mean…
