54 Comments

This is a great piece. Congrats on your new independence.

I am hoping you can go into more detail in a future piece about stock buy backs and how executives can get away with what appears to be an obvious grift.

Thanks for your work during this crisis!

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Congrats on your independence. It is my pleasure to subscribe. I have not had a cable subscription for quite some time. Instead, I spend that money on supporting independent reporting.

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The US doesn't export much that anyone really wants. Its financialized economy is kept going by printing money and dropping it on the owning class, at the cost of the growing national debt. As the government gets progressively more insolvent, sooner or later the holders of government bonds will give dump them. When will that happen and what will come next?

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Now it's time for the $trillions taken out of corporations through dividends and buybacks to be replaced by new equity, not loans and guarantees, Those companies with financial needs (like Boeing, for example) could be required to raise needed funds through shareholder equity rights offerings at whatever price is needed to raise those funds. If necessary these funds could be backstopped by the Feds, but the point is that there IS a price at which equity can be raised.

This approach used to be common.

For example, if Boeing needs $50 billion, then a rights offering to raise $50 billion may require the sale of, say, 10 billion shares at $5 or maybe just 5 billion shares at $10 with each current shareholder to participate or sell his "rights" to participate to others. No loans, no guarantees.

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Buybacks is basically giving shareholder’s money to people who do not want to be shareholders.

How such an obviously crooked system ever got the purchase it did is a testimony to the dishonesty of it’s promoters, and the stupidity of the investing public.

Possibly both.

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its also stunning to me how quickly all this happens. the covid-19 rescue bill got hammered together at lightning speed... but that still left the horse's ass whisperers and the groin leeches more than enough time to bend and mold and reshape. wow.

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Excellent. Keep up the great work.

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The role of BlackRock in selling and buying corporate bonds is what struck me. That "quaint term from the 20th century," conflict of interest doesn't even begin to cover it.

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Dear Matt. Yes dear, that's what Capitalism has always been, an unfair economy. It only worked as long as something 'trickled down'. As my grandmother always said, it will eventually have to devour itself. It's time to to envision a world after it does, one that also exists without ice in Greenland.

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Buybacks are an absolute corrupt aspect of the stock market. I watch CNBC and it’s just constant ass kissing of all these dumb ass corporate CEOs who have gotten us into another recession as a result of their greed!

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Another great story, Matt. Keep up the good work. I wish you the best of luck switching over to a subscription format. As a journalist myself, I'm very interested to see how it will turn out.

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Well if the bomb is continually being reset, it better be handled carefully lest it go off.

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Your opinion of Trump are baseless and were formed using flawed data fed to you by the corrupt and partisan corporate media establishment. You are a useless idiot who’s promoting the factional interests of people who don’t have your best interest in mind. The more I run into people who think your way the more I’m convinced America is close to breaking apart into several separate countries. Your worldview is toxic and your party’s leadership is corrupt to the core. I have no respect for you. My only wish is to defeat and then destroy the Democrats this fall. Drop dead.

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I loved the article but missed any talk of ideas that would solve these problems using alternative methods that are superior to what has been done in the past.

It's easy to point out problems, scapegoat the usual suspects (bankers, corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthiest 1%), and non-stop complaining than to find alternative solutions.

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This may sound quaint to care about, but one of the virtues of the old mode was that it was relatively inexpensive to the end user. Of course quality is everything when it comes to information, the good stuff has always been more pricey, I suppose, and propaganda and fan-service news doesn't get any better because it's cheap.

And the subscription model was what much of the first media, the print media, was based on here in the beginning, in the Colonial period. From what I know nobody felt much obligated to "cover both sides" back then, either.

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Amazing! Can't wait for more!

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