Matt Levine: Anti-buyback rhetoric ignores managerial capital discipline
Matt Levine · Matt Levine – Money Stuff (Capital Allocators, EP.97) · Apr 29, 2019 · at 20:46
Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine discusses corporate capital allocation and the public debate surrounding stock repurchases with Ted Seides.
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“And we've now perhaps swung too far, but also like the rhetoric has swung too far where now it's just assumed that the worst thing companies can do is give money back to shareholders. Now there are some arguments for that. Like the shareholders are often like the managers own a lot of shares and boost their own compensation and so forth. But the sort of original notion that returning money to shareholders disciplines managers and allows And prevents them from wasting the money has been lost, and we've kind of gone the other way, which I find kind of weird.”
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