[empath-nirvana]

Stocks and bonds (or loans) are both liabilities. Only difference is priority. Lenders have priority over shareholders in the event of a liquidation. If you own stock in a company and they're shifting from being funded by capital to being funded by debt, it mostly shouldn't matter unless they're going bankrupt, and in this case they clearly were headed that way and stockholders should have sold.

In some sense _the entire reason that companies exist_ is so that shareholders can at some point extract some money from the company and there's only two ways to do that -- either through dividends or growth. BB was (at best) clearly no longer a growth company, and stock buybacks are just dividends in disguise. They're a strong signal that you should be cashing out at least some of of your position as a stock holder while you can.