There’s now also moral hazard too with the rise of indexing and retirement. They need to keep the WHOLE stock market up. Many fewer investors now do any research and chose companies based on fundamentals. The companies that exist today must exist forever into in roughly the same proportions to keep SP 500 index from falling too heavily.

Companies exploit this relationship now by destroying their balance sheets and using buybacks to boost their relative market caps vs other companies to capture more passive investment money flow.

There’s a good argument (elsewhere) that because vanguard of we’ve entered a pseudo communist market system.