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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zzpat who wrote (44786)	11/14/2017 12:38:38 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361181

Stock buybacks with borrowed money absolutely make sense, if you can get rock bottom interest rates due to Fed manipulation here in the US, and can not bring your cash hoard back to the US from overseas without taking a 35% tax hit. CEOs are profit beasts. They will look for every angle and every break they can get and they never stop. If they can get a break from the government on taxes, they'll take it. They'd be fools not to. Spending money on lobbyists in the US to get preferential treatment is an investment that pays a huge ROI, because we have a totally screwed up government and laws that don't limit lobbyists and the revolving door between government and industry. As to short term mindset, I do agree with you there. Some CEOs are better at thinking very long term, but most CEOs are driving by the quarterly earnings mindset. That's a big problem. I think we could move in a better direction by strengthening shareholder laws that give them more of a voice in the boardrooms. For example, we could give shareholders a binding 1 share 1 vote on issues. So if shareholders don't like what they are seeing, they could band together and demand change with a binding vote. Instead, shareholder votes are treated like recommendations and are non-binding. That allows all sorts of aberration like having the CEO also be Chairman of the board, with powers to select the other B.O.D. members. That is the fox guarding the hen house. So yes, we have structural problems in our corporate laws that allow for widespread abuse, but that is evidence of CEOs being smart and predatory, rather than evidence of them being stupid. What we need are smarter legislators and smarter regulatory agencies to reign them in. Don't blame the lion for eating the deer. Blame the zookeeper for not keeping them separated. Of course, that metaphor only goes so far. I would have prosecuted all the banksters during the financial crisis, but they were all left unscathed and enriched. That's an example of a system where regulatory capture has gone systemic, if every there was one.