Feeding their Greed

Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients—which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives—reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity. By increasing the demand for a company’s shares, open-market buybacks automatically lift its stock price, even if only temporarily.

The allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks deserves much of the blame. Consider the 449 companies in the S&P 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those companies used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings. That left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees.

From 2004 to 2013 about 9,000 companies in the Compustat database wasted $6.9 trillion on stock buybacks — that’s equivalent to nearly half their profits. They also spent $7.5 trillion on dividends, the normal way of providing holders of corporate stock with income on their portfolio investments. The U.S. companies in the S&P 500 Index, which account for over 70 percent of total U.S. market capitalization, did half of those buybacks, representing about 50 percent of their combined profits. In 2012, the average compensation of the 500 highest paid executives on company proxy statements was $30.3 million, with 83 percent from stock-based compensation that incentivizes massive buybacks to manipulate the stock market.

Over the decade 2004-2013, 75 companies included in 11 high-tech industry categories in the 2013 Fortune 500 list expended $1.1 trillion on stock repurchases and more than half a trillion dollars on cash dividends.

“It concerns us that, in the wake of the financial crisis, many companies have shied away from investing in the future growth of their companies,” Laurence Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, wrote in an open letter to corporate America in March 2014. “Too many companies have cut capital expenditure and even increased debt to boost dividends and increase share buybacks.”

Since the late 1980s, the largest component of the income of the top 0.1% has been compensation, driven by stock-based pay. In 2012 the 500 highest-paid executives named in proxy statements of U.S. public companies received, on average, $30.3 million each; 42% of their compensation came from stock options and 41% from stock awards. Even when adjusted for inflation, the compensation of top U.S. executives has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the growth of workers’ wages has been slow and sporadic, except during the internet boom of 1998–2000, the only time in the past 46 years when real wages rose by 2% or more for three years running. Since the late 1970s, average growth in real wages has increasingly lagged productivity growth.

Companies have been allowed to repurchase their shares on the open market with virtually no regulatory limits since 1982, when the SEC instituted Rule 10b-18 of the Securities Exchange Act. Under the rule, a corporation’s board of directors can authorize senior executives to repurchase up to a certain dollar amount of stock over a specified or open-ended period of time, and the company must publicly announce the buyback program. After that, management can buy a large number of the company’s shares on any given business day without fear that the SEC will charge it with stock-price manipulation—provided, among other things, that the amount does not exceed a “safe harbor” of 25% of the previous four weeks’ average daily trading volume. The SEC requires companies to report total quarterly repurchases but not daily ones, meaning that it cannot determine whether a company has breached the 25% limit without a special investigation. Despite the escalation in buybacks over the past three decades, the SEC has only rarely launched proceedings against a company for using them to manipulate its stock price. And even within the 25% limit, companies can still make huge purchases: Exxon Mobil, by far the biggest stock repurchaser from 2003 to 2012, can buy back about $300 million worth of shares a day, and Apple up to $1.5 billion a day. In essence, Rule 10b-18 legalized stock market manipulation through open-market repurchases. “The mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,” the SEC’s website explains, “is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Yet, as we have seen, in its rulings on and monitoring of stock buybacks and executive pay over three decades, the SEC has taken a course of action contrary to those objectives. It has enabled the wealthiest 0.1% of society, including top executives, to capture the lion’s share of the gains of U.S. productivity growth while the vast majority of Americans have been left behind. Rule 10b-18, in particular, has facilitated a rigged stock market that, by permitting the massive distribution of corporate cash to shareholders, has undermined capital formation, including human capital formation.

Exxon Mobil, while receiving about $600 million a year in U.S. government subsidies for oil exploration (according to the Center for American Progress), spends about $21 billion a year on buybacks. It spends virtually no money on alternative energy research. Through the American Energy Innovation Council, top executives of Microsoft, GE, and other companies have lobbied the U.S. government to triple its investment in alternative energy research and subsidies, to $16 billion a year. Yet these companies had plenty of funds they could have invested in alternative energy on their own. Over the past decade Microsoft and GE, combined, have spent about that amount annually on buybacks. In response to complaints that U.S. drug prices are at least twice those in any other country, Pfizer and other U.S. pharmaceutical companies have argued that the profits from these high prices—enabled by a generous intellectual-property regime and lax price regulation—permit more R&D to be done in the United States than elsewhere. Yet from 2003 through 2012, Pfizer funneled an amount equal to 71% of its profits into buybacks, and an amount equal to 75% of its profits into dividends. In other words, it spent more on buybacks and dividends than it earned and tapped its capital reserves to help fund them. The reality is, Americans pay high drug prices so that major pharmaceutical companies can boost their stock prices and pad executive pay.

From here and here