Companies Use Borrowed Billions to Buy Back Stock, Not to Invest
So many comments here along the lines of "So what, they're making an efficient use of capital." That's missing the point. So much of the argument behind the 2017 tax cuts and the Fed's low interest rates was that they would spur real investment (that is, investment which increases productive capacity or improves productivity) that would benefit everyone, mainly through jobs. If all this extra money is just resulting in a more tax-efficient way for companies to give money to their shareholders, which in reality is a small slice of the populace, highly skewed towards the wealthy, it's certainly worth it to call bullshit that these governmental moves that everyone ends up paying for only end up benefiting the wealthy.