> Companies are giving their cash back to shareholders because each individual company thinks their shareholders can better allocate the cash, rather than the companies themselves.

This is very strange explaination. As stated it sounds like stock buybacks are some sort of altruistic endeavor resulting from some kind of collective shrug.

This couldn’t be further from truth. Buybacks are the result of executive incentives to hit a certain stock valuation. You can either do this the intended way by growing the company’s value by making competing in the marketplace, or you can do it the lazy underhanded way by manipulating the stock market by creating an artificial scarcity.

You don’t get chalk this up to a faceless emergent phenomena when there are a very short list of people on FTC documents who made the decision at each and every one of the these companies.