| Not to pick on you, but you stared your pay with a series of trivia steak arguments - but all examples of things I see repeated with little consideration. > Yes, but companies run for investors will always have to pay investors, so it would have either been a buyback or dividends. Your argument here is that the pivot two things companies can spend money on is dividends or stock buybacks? An incredibly false choice. They can also clearly invest in staying competitive. > When interest rates go up, companies end up competing with government bonds, and they must give dividends that keep them competitive, Why do you think they must do this? These aren't bonds - people aren't looking to park money at a risk free rate. They are stocks - different investments with different expectations. Setting the expectation of one based on the other is false. They should be ensuring the can keep with with short term growth of more than 4% per year non adjusted, which should be easy in an inflationary environment. And let's dig further into what you said about this "must". Must implies no other reasonable option - the consequences of anything else would be to negative. So when you say they must do buy backs or higher dividends, I ask "or else what?". Simply put, what hairband is they don't? The company doesn't fold. Consumers don't suddenly stop buying their products. What actually happens that they need to avoid? Not much really much of note really. They say/signal "instead of giving you this money right now, we're going to invest it to remain competitive and more productive in the future". If some investors don't believe them or doubt want to wait the stock price dips for some period of time and then rebounds as those investments become realized with increased efficiency and superior products. > For investing in the future to be possible interest rates must essentially be low. Finally this is wrong. It doesn't require low interest rates is you're flush with cash. If you've given away all of your cash then yes you need to borrow to invest. But if you have tons of cash you don't need to borrow to have cash. |
Do you think investors, especially institutional ones that manage retirement funds etc. would just ignore the CEO/board and not receive any returns?