Not terribly interesting from an Apple perspective but I did find this illuminating.

"But as enforcement loosened, notably under the Reagan administration, buybacks began to increase. Now, they are omnipresent. A Roosevelt Institute study released on Tuesday found that corporations spent 60 percent of their net profits on stock buybacks between 2015-2017."

Sixty percent of profits on AVERAGE from 2015-2017 (across all corporations? US?).

Compound this with statistics (same article) that see no long term stock benefit from these short-term injections and you have a broken system of incentives with a generation of executives playing games with bonuses. It reminds me of all these studies criticising code metrics like lines-of-code as producing nothing useful except extra verbose code.