, Columnist
What Would Companies Do If Buybacks Were Banned?
Economists like William Lazonick advocate for shared prosperity, but it's not clear that restricting stock repurchases would change much.
Just imagine: Once shareholders put money into a corporation, it could never come out.
Photographer: Pool/Getty Images North AmericaThis post originally appeared in Money Stuff.
At the New Yorker, Sheelah Kolhatkar has an intellectual history of people worrying about stock buybacks, largely about economist William Lazonick, whose 2014 article “Profits Without Prosperity” “argued that the ‘allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks’ deserves most of the blame for the stagnation of wage growth for the majority of Americans, the fact that well-paid jobs are increasingly scarce, and the dramatic rise in income inequality.” Also plane crashes: