Companies that binged on buybacks now seek bailouts from taxpayers
CNNNew York CNN Business — Corporate America, armed with the Trump tax cuts, lavished Wall Street with a multi-trillion dollar share buyback spree over the past two years. “I’m outraged that after receiving a huge windfall from the 2017 tax law, many companies chose to spend billions on stock buybacks instead of making long-term investments in their company and their workers,” Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, told CNN Business in an email. Baldwin, a longtime critic of buybacks, introduced legislation last week that would permanently ban buybacks at bailed-out companies that repurchased $1 billion of stock over the last five years. Buybacks at S&P 500 companies exploded by 55% to a record $806.4 billion in 2018, the first year the tax law took effect, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices. Airlines for America, the industry trade group, said the companies spent about $48 billion on buybacks in the last 10 years.
History of this topic
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