> highest-profile recent example of borrowing for buybacks: > Apple (ticker: AAPL). The tech giant sold $14 billion in bonds this month, and said it would use at least part of the proceeds on buybacks and dividends.[0]
Kinda problematic when one large company doing buybacks dominates over thousands doing issuing reversing your entire narrative. Taking out bonds to give to shareholders is not something that helps main street.
Within ten years a film will come out about the next economic disaster and everyone will be saying "how could we be so stupid to allow firms to buy their own stock with debt?" much like the housing crisis.
why not? What's wrong with altering a company's capital structure to be more efficient?
Stocks have a cost (aka, cost of equity), just like debt. Sometimes, cost of equity is higher than cost of debt (aka, the interest rate). Sometimes, the cost of debt is higher than cost of equity. This is determined by the general market conditions and economic environment.
A company may find itself in a situation where the cost of equity is very high, and cost of debt is very low. In this case, it makes a lot of sense for the company to borrow to reduce the amount of outstanding equity on the market. There is an equalizing point, where the total cost of capital is lowest, and that is where the company's money source is most efficient.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with company buying back stocks, if this is the case. The only problem, really, is that buybacks gives capital gains for stockholders, and this is taxed lower than normal income. This is a question of taxation policy, not stock buybacks. Is it fair that capital gains are taxed less than earned income?
If the firm instead took out loans to pay out dividends would you feel differently? Now what if they did it every year at a increasing pace to the point where it's expected that firms take on debt to support ever larger dividends? That bubble pops eventually and is what I see happening with buybacks.
taking out debt to pay out dividends does not make any change to the capital structure of a company (i.e., the debt load increased, but the equity structure stayed the same). This basically means the company is losing that money paid out, and thus, the equity's price would drop by that equivelent amount, and then added a debt obligation (so an even more loss).
This, no shareholder controlled board would ever authorize taking out debt to pay dividends, unless there's some special circumstances for which this makes sense (i can't think of any atm).
The difference with buybacks using debt is that buybacks changes the capital structure. I suppose if the debt is artificially cheap (say, the gov't is forcing interest rates down to lower than what the market rate _would_ be), then it makes sense from a financial perspective, to borrow money, and pay (to the shareholders) the difference between the "real" market rate and the artificial rate. But this predicates that the real rate is much higher (transactional costs, and other overheads might easily dwarf this difference in rate).
> This, no shareholder controlled board would ever authorize taking out debt to pay dividends, unless there's some special circumstances
Energy (oil & gas) companies certainly did last year. Those stocks are a little different than the broader market, in that investors in them generally aren't looking for appreciation in share price, they want consistently high dividends. Exxon is a good example of this.
“... taking out debt to pay out dividends does not make any change to the capital structure of a company (i.e., the debt load increased, but the equity structure stayed the same)”
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Increasing debt and giving the proceeds away to shareholders definitely alters the debt ratio of a company ... basic financial accounting concept.
I am pretty sophisticated in terms of my acceptance of modern finance but I am a heels-dug-in naysayer when it comes to buybacks. I hate them and I think they are evil. But what can you do
You're right: even though $2 trillion of bonds have been issued by US companies, one $14 billion ($0.014 trillion) issue to buyback stocks completely reverses my entire narrative.
The pandemic has not hit Apple as hard as other industries, and they're taking advantage of low interest rates by issuing debt.
And there's nothing wrong with buying back stock. It's bad when managers use it to boost their personal compensation. That's not happening in Apple's case; they are just returning capital to investors because Apple is doing well and is sitting on a huge balance sheet.
One company(like Apple) negates thousands of small companies. There are many large companies like Apple. The Market Cap of the S&P 500 is up $4 trillion. All of those bonds went straight into the market.
Why not just show me the increased consumption? Show me these increased workers. Show me the raises.
CPI is up 1.5%, due directly to Congress, not the Fed. Unemployment is at 10%. The money supply is up 25%. The velocity of the M2 is down 21%. Straight into assets.
There's nothing wrong with using debt to buyback stock because the environment is corrupted. That's the problem. Fix the environment.
Apple is kind of a poor example here because they're borrowing money at extremely low interest rates and the collateral is all the money they have overseas. They took advantage of that one time 15.5 percent rate after the TCJA passed but they didn't stop earning gobs of money overseas. They're not taking on actual debt to finance buybacks, they're just creatively getting around tax laws.
Kinda problematic when one large company doing buybacks dominates over thousands doing issuing reversing your entire narrative. Taking out bonds to give to shareholders is not something that helps main street.
[0]:https://www.barrons.com/articles/debt-fueled-stock-buybacks-...