Companies Use Borrowed Billions to Buy Back Stock, Not to Invest

Re:Companies Use Borrowed Billions to Buy Back Stock, Not to... by zamalek on Saturday August 10, 2019 @10:53PM (#20665915)

The third answer is that debt is risky. Economy crashes? You're toast. Stock market crashes? You're toast.

The first rule of investment/saving is to nuke your debts. Stocks are, effectively, debts. This makes complete sense to me. It's a conservative (the unpolitical kind) approach.

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Re:Companies Use Borrowed Billions to Buy Back Stock, Not to... by RhodesianHunter on Sunday August 11, 2019 @12:38AM (#20666265)

Not really. Debt at low interest rates is pretty low risk. The first rule of investment is to deploy your capital where you will realize the best returns. If you can make 6% and have borrowed at 3% then paying down your debts would be foolish.

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Re:Companies Use Borrowed Billions to Buy Back Stock, Not to... by prirun on Sunday August 11, 2019 @11:11AM (#20668496)

I think this works as long as you have income to pay off the debt and actually are paying off the debt. But isn't it a problem when:

- you're only paying the interest and rolling over the debt; that only works with declining interest rates

- your income goes down for whatever reason and you can no longer make the debt payments

- you think "I'll just sell the stock" I accumulated, but that may not be possible if the stock price is declining.

If your income goes down, your stock price is probably also declining at the same time, but you still have those debt payments to make.

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