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Comment by beams_of_light | Hacker News Reader

Intel is suffering financially. This is the phase in which they, regretfully, cross all ethical boundaries for the sake of the company's bottom line.

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If that's not the reason Nvidia is doing it too, why should we believe this is the reason Intel is doing it? Truth is they're just greedy and they're doing it because they can.

Edit for FirmwareBurner: I will, after you point out the part of my comment in which I claim that some F500 companies aren't greedy.

Please show me a F500 publicly listed company that isn't greedy.

The way our capitalist economy functions and CEO compensations are set, encourages nothing but greed and short therm profits at the expense of everything else.

It's the pressure for growth. Who started this trend of rewarding shareholders through share price increase instead of dividends? Was it Apple? Some entity in an unrelated market 50 years before Apple?

What difference does that make?

The demand for returns comes from equity owners, such as people with 401k and pension funds.

Yes but if your numbers are constant you can still pay dividends, as long as you're profitable, while if you need to provide capital gains you need to increase the numbers so the share price will go up.

This is before taking into account how these things are taxed.

Edit: you changed your comment :) I answered the previous version.

Edit 2: and even a pension fund could take their dividends and reinvest them. But I guess that would be too much work.

I changed my comment to ignore the tax treatment since dividends from stocks held for more than a year are taxed the same way capital gains are taxed.

> Yes but if your numbers are constant you can still pay dividends, as long as you're profitable,

Is this not where the money for share buybacks comes from? The business can choose to pay dividends (cash), or it can spend the cash on buying back its shares. Either way, it should offset equally.

>while if you need to provide capital gains you need to increase the numbers so the share price will go up.

This does not make sense. The share price depends on supply and demand of the share. If the business is doing share buybacks, then there is less supply and more demand for the shares, hence share price increase.

Anyway, my point is the pressure for growth has nothing to do with share buybacks versus dividends. Investors like more money than less money just like anyone else does. One could even say all these taxpayer underfunded pension plans for government employees that have long assumed 8%+ growth to meet their obligations are “pressuring” businesses for growth.

....Where did Apple come into this?

The origin of the pressure is likely a shift from shareholders being primarily people who want to hold onto a given stock for many years, and be rewarded through dividends, to being primarily financially-oriented institutions who want to buy low and sell high constantly.

I just have a faint idea Apple is one of the first tech companies that never paid dividends.

And yes, that was my point.

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