Ooh nice, TIL and thanks! I really liked "Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric" about the failure of GE and was looking for something similar.
On the topic of buybacks and dividends, it's part of the short term quarter-oriented thinking. Spinning off subdivisions and doing stock buybacks and dividends are very popular and look good on the balance sheet in the short term... but if you think about a quarter or two ahead, it's crippling. But it doesn't matter, stock go up, bonus go up, everyone happy for now, kicking the can down the road until it's someone else's problem.
That companies should always operate as worker cooperatives and never return money to shareholders?
Because stock buybacks are just another type of dividends.
Stock buybacks have destroyed companies like GE and Boeing.
This is very well covered in the book about Boeing - Flying Blind. A bunch of Jack Welch mentees did the same trick, selling the company for parts and buying back the stock - until there was nothing left to sell. It was very "profitable" for a while, though!
It's not a tool for company growth - it's an accounting trick to make the wealthy ultra-wealthy.
There is a reason why buybacks at these levels were illegal (or at least very hard) until the early 80s, but there were multiple pro-big-business "reforms" that took root under Reagan which are now wrecking sensible Capitalism.