William Lazonick, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, who has devoted much of his research to the topic of buybacks, has written that the rule change “in effect gave corporations license to use open-market repurchases to manipulate the market.”
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In an interview, Lazonick told Retail Dive, “These distributions to shareholders, particularly buybacks on top of dividends, are at the expense of keeping people employed, rewarding them for the work they’ve done, and investing in new products and processes.”
