A quarter of S&P 500 companies have disclosed plans to return some tax savings to shareholders and that in the first half of 2018 alone, public companies have announced a record $600 billion in buybacks—which, until 1982, were considered stock market manipulation and thus illegal.
Since the tax cuts were enacted, Oracle Corp. CEO Safra Catz has sold $250 million worth of shares in her company—the largest executive payday this year. Product development head Thomas Kurian sold $85 million. The sales came after the company announced a $12 billion share repurchase.
Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga sold $44.4 million of stock in May, the largest single cash-out by an executive of the company in at least 10 years, months after the company announced a $4 billion buyback of its own stock.
Two days after Eastman Chemical announced it would purchase $2 billion of its own stock, CEO Mark Costa sold 55,000 shares for $5.4 million.
S&P 500 companies are on track to repurchase as much as $800 billion in stock this year, a record that would eclipse 2007’s buyback bonanza. Among the biggest buyers are companies like Oracle Corp. , Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
But 57% of the more than 350 companies in the S&P 500 that bought back shares so far this year are trailing the index’s 3.2% increase. That is the highest percentage of companies to fall short of the benchmark’s gain since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of share buyback and performance data from FactSet.
No comments:
Post a Comment