This Hasn’t Happened In 10 Years: S&P 500 Buybacks Edition

Who could have seen this coming?

For the first time in a decade, buybacks account for the biggest share of corporate cash use by S&P 500 companies.

In the lead up to the passage of the Trump tax cuts late last year, critics argued that invariably, corporations would use their windfall to return cash to shareholders as opposed to say, investing in their businesses or raising wages for employees.

Importantly, it wasn’t just critics of the tax plan who suggested shareholders would be the prime beneficiaries of the cuts. Rather, anyone with any sense knew that would be the outcome because, well, because that’s how things work in a world where investors are myopic and only care about the next earnings report and where management’s compensation is often equity-linked.

The point is, you needn’t have been an “anti-Trumper” to see where this was going.

Sure enough, buybacks have surged in 2018, helping to shield the U.S. equity market from the turmoil abroad, where, for instance, Chinese stocks are in a bear market, emerging market equities and FX are under siege from the stronger dollar and European financials and autos are themselves struggling to extricate themselves from a deep malaise.

In fact, Goldman’s buyback desk last month upped its estimate for repurchase authorizations in 2018 to a record $1.0 trillion. If that pans out, it would amount to a 46% increase from 2017.

Buybacks

So we know shareholders have benefited from the tax cuts and we know corporate bottom lines have been bolstered. But have workers benefited at all from the windfall to America’s largest corporations? Well, that depends on how you look at it.

When the tax bill was finally crammed through, the media was awash in reports of one-time bonuses for employees that amounted to rounding errors on C-suite paychecks and in one particularly amusing case, Hostess employees were given free HoHos and all-you-can-eat Ding Dongs. That was a literal “let them eat cake” moment.