It’s the C Suite members, and it’s the board members... it’s a small group of people at the top who are trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the company and at the expense of the people who actually run the company.
It's a load of crap that this is even a concept if the government cannot get involved at that point.
Amazon and Wal Mart could disappear overnight and I would just shop elsewhere. Amazon isn't in charge of my water quality or road maintenance.
Do you think that there is enough inventory and stock to go around? Would those alternatives replenish their inventory in a timely fashion? Would you seek alternatives to your normal shopping?
I think people vastly overestimate the capabilities of their local options.
Neither Amazon nor Walmart produce those commodities, they distribute them. Sure, there would be some initial issues, but both the remaining distributors as well as the producers would have strong incentives to quickly resolve those issues.
Companies like Amazon and Walmart massively distort the market, and do so quite deliberately. It's hopelessly naïve to think that if they vanished tomorrow, everyone would be able to just shrug and switch their purchasing to a drop-in replacement.
That's only possible in, as someone else described it, the "spherical cow in a vacuum" type of hypothetical free market. We live in the real world, where an arbitrary number of fully equivalent businesses can't actually continue to compete perfectly for everyone's money.
An enormous amount of people in America would be utterly screwed if it went away.
Also, the overwhelming majority of people are driving to Walmart so even if significantly less convenient they can also drive somewhere else.
Although the only thing I wish they cut back on was their employee culture cult stuff. It reminds me of McDonalds where you have to say thank you to a supervisor after everything, even if they're yelling at you to be a dick. It's like the f'ing military. That kinda brainwashing garbage needs to go.
It's somewhat interesting that when coming up with a list of two 'monopolist' companies, you came up with two companies that compete directly.
I find it interesting how in economics, analysis is based on rational actors, but whenever something goes wrong or doesn't agree, it's irrationality's fault.
Maybe there is a rationality to perceived irrationality that simply doesn't agree with the sensibilities of the claimer of other's initial irrationality?
Even if that were true, "the organization that has the biggest impact on your daily lives" is a weird definition of "government".
Your behavior is shaped by so many external influences that we often forget that the government most often has very little direct influence in our lives. Businesses typically encounter more interactions with the government, but average folks interact with businesses. Corporate cultures in a weird way end up becoming our "culture" we believe in, our "religious" views (not in a theological way). While we're all essentially considered "Freemen" in this world, sometimes you are not because of things like bills or debt bondage. You cannot leave from your "Lord" or "company" because you owe a debt somewhere or simply cannot afford to leave. It's a complicated system, but the concept of fuedalism has just been expanded.
My question is: Why had the stock market continued to go up despite flat profits?
To use poker as an analogy: if you aren't sufficiently bankrolled, the correct play (most positive EV) can involve an unacceptably high risk of ruin. ....and BTW are you also factoring in the probability of fraud or a government seizure in your calculations?
Why?
When interest rates are low, firms can finance to buy back. Not only that, investors shift their investments to stocks, instead of bonds. Two forces are at work to pump stocks, both forces are products of low interest rates.
If true then that's pretty impressive and possibly much better than what the markets ~10 years ago expected?
Since 2014, Profit (before taxes) has been roughly $2.2 trillion every year.
Amazon and Walmart's power comes from being cheaper/better than the alternatives (though they may engage in unfair and unethical behavior as a means to that end). Government's power comes from having a monopoly on violence. These are very different and one has to be very far removed from government violence to think otherwise.
Desperate people with no practical negotiating leverage may have the theoretical power of foot-voting, but it provides zero practical value.
Given that a lot of regions outside of urban areas are varying degrees of labor-monopsonies with a very few large employers, not having an official right to shoot your workers really doesn't make a massive difference in the amount of control they can exert.
These the so called "too big to fail" types of companies which borderline monopolize market sectors like Amazon and Walmart. But they don't care during recessions because they're fine. They essentially are the government as they have a larger impact on your daily life than the actual government!
It's not so much that the stock buybacks are the straw that broke the camel's back, it's just another inevitable economic event that the invisible hand dealt. There is no stopping it. Otherwise we're just back in a labor economy again where money can't flow where irrational people deem they need to place it.