Matt Levine, Columnist

Quasi-Indexers, Growth and Confusion

Also investment banking sales, jury-duty debit cards, Tuscan vineyards and flinging at Fling.

February 9, 2017 at 2:27 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Should index funds be illegal because people are worried about stock buybacks?

One popular worry about modern financial capitalism is that companies are investing less in their future growth than they should be, because rapacious shareholders are demanding that they spend their money on stock buybacks instead. Here's a new working paper from Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon finding more or less that. Companies are investing less in their future growth than they should be: