I too was a little flustered trying to follow the argument here. These additional sources helped a little: Troy Segal, "Why would a company buy back its own sh

I too was a little flustered trying to follow the argument here. These additional sources helped a little: Troy Segal, "Why would a company buy back its own shares?", Investopedia, 20 Jun 2018. Annie Lowry, "Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?", The Atlantic, 31 Jul 2018 Katy Milani, Irene Tung, "Curbing Stock Buybacks: A Crucial Step to Raising Worker Pay and Reducing Inequality", Roosevelt Institute, 31 Jul 2018 I'm new to this, so let me share my thinking here and see if I've got it right. The argument is that money that could be going towards investment in growing the company and/or rewarding the employees is instead going towards buybacks. Buybacks have the benefit of increasing the stock price and consolidating ownership, which generally benefit both stockholders and executives, but exclude many classes of workers who don't own shares. Dividends would be a similar thing to plow a company's dollars into. Again: benefiting stockholders, but excluding workers who don't own shares. Companies these days who are involved in feeding money back to investors like to balance between issuing dividends and buying back stock--in many cases, biasing strongly in favor of buybacks. There are a few reasons for this, including investors wigging out far less if you have to cut back on buybacks vs dividends during a recession. Nevertheless, there seems to be an expectation that shareholders will continue to increase their profits--specifically, that dividends will increase if the company is issuing dividends. Indeed, it seems to me that a company runs a risk of activist shareholders taking them over if they don't do a good enough job of satisfying them. So if a company shifts those dollars away from shareholders and into wages, and the shareholders revolt as a result, does that necessarily make those companies or their employees any better off? I can see a problem for sure, since the increase in income inequality in the US is an undeniable problem, a lot of workers are not getting any better off from either stock buybacks or dividends, and the Roosevelt Institute makes some compelling arguments for why stock buybacks are not great for long-term strategy and profitability even among shareholders--including the startling fact that some companies, particularly in the restaurant business, are actually putting themselves significantly into the red to buy back shares! I'm not sure that it's a problem that regulators are obligated to fix by going directly after stock buybacks, though.