Companies Keep Buying Back Stock

People are worried about stock buybacks.

One strain of thinking that I see a lot of these days is a sort of crypto-gig-utopianism. The idea here is that some modern technologies—the internet, which allows people all over the world to come together to do stuff; smartphones, which allow you to access that stuff instantly wherever you are; blockchain and cryptocurrencies, which allow distributed coordination among independent agents without a central coordinator who owns the results—have reduced transaction costs to the point that traditional firms are unnecessary. You don’t need a big corporation with a chief executive officer and layers of middle management and a human-resources department and stock options and a permanent headquarters to centrally plan and coordinate projects. People who want a project to happen can form an ad hoc team to do the project, and raise money from people who want it done, and do it, and receive the rewards, and move on to the next thing. New coordination mechanisms—blockchains, tokens, smart contracts, crowdfunding, online clearinghouses for gig workers—will replace the stodgy old coordination mechanisms like having a job, doing what your boss tells you to, and using money from shareholders and lenders to do it.