Bed Bath & Beyond has filed for bankruptcy shortly after spending $1B in stock buybacks & cash payments to shareholders. Employees of 20 years got 0 notice & $0 severance.

It wasn't inflation. It wasn't labor cost. It is 100% corporate greed.

Tax billionaires. Unionize workers. Protect our economy.

@QasimRashid ban short selling and stock buybacks. Ban short selling yesterday. Why do we even have regulators? What benefit does short selling provide society at large? Unreal this keeps happening over and over.

@Stoneycase @QasimRashid Short selling is healthy, though. It's good for some investors to have an incentive to bust hype cycles rather than everyone trying to feed into them, drive prices up, and cash out.

100% with you on buybacks, though. I don't see any societal or broad-market value in them.

@whetstone @Stoneycase @QasimRashid Buybacks are an important indicator: they announce that capital gains taxes are too low relative to income taxes, and that management has no ideas for profitable investments.
@opendna That's actually a very good point. I wish that, as an indicator, it were acted upon by legislators and punished by investors.
@whetstone @opendna while I mostly agree, didn’t Dell do a huge share buyback a couple of years ago to restore control of the company? Dell seems to be doing just fine, though I can accept that might be an exception
@proji @opendna I’m not sure how regulators could distinguish between buybacks to consolidate ownership/control management vs buybacks to pump up execs’ options *and* make them more liquid, but I agree that there’s a meaningful difference in the motivations.
@whetstone @opendna as I recall, Dell were quite open about their reasons for buying back. I grant you this would be the exception rather than the norm and as you say distinguishing between motivations would be crucial. I guess it could only be done retrospectively. So Dell would be given a pass where the actions of BB&B would be subject to further scrutiny ie did the board have prior knowledge of this outcome and was the buyback motivated by that?

@proji @whetstone The board of BB&B knew the company was loosing money during most of the years it was buying back stock. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bed-bath-beyond-how-stock-buybacks-undermined-the-company-154202427.html If they still had the cash, they wouldn't be bankrupt.

Why they thought the stock price was so important, I don’t know.

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