Big Cable says investment is flourishing, but their data says it's falling
"The industry is acting like a low-competition industry, scaling back investment and plowing its profits into dividends and share buybacks and merger efforts."<p>Most US industries are in a similar state (plowing profits into dividends and share buybacks and mergers). What's happening is companies are seeing there will be more benefit to their share holders to borrow money against their existing capital and paying that out as dividends than to risk that borrowed capital to make new investments. This is happening because the Federal Reserve has pushed the interest rate to near zero, at the same time people are over leveraged (since money has been so cheap for so long) and don't have the money to increase their spending in the future, which reduces the chance new investments will pay off.<p>EDIT: This website tends to be very pessimistic, but I found the following article informative and would illustrate my point well: <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-12/writing-wall-and-we-should-all-read-it" rel="nofollow">http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-12/writing-wall-and-we...</a>