It's fair to separate the issues of borrowing and stock-buybacks ... specifically because the borrowing has to be based on the credit worthiness of the company,

It's fair to separate the issues of borrowing and stock-buybacks ... specifically because the borrowing has to be based on the credit worthiness of the company, and the stock-buybacks are a separate thing entirely. Using debt instead of equity is a rational thing for companies to do if debt is really cheap. The 'higher stock price' as a result of the buybacks is effectively an adjustment of the equilibrium to that fact: the company is taking advantage of cheap sources of financing. If the company is doing sneaky things like hiding problems, or if the lenders are failing to do due diligence .... then yes, this can be a problem. Or of companies are over-leveraging - again a potential problem. But tapping into cheap debt, even combined with stock-buybacks - this could definitely be characterized as an intelligent kind of financial engineering, I don't think that it should be in and of itself viewed as suspicious or negative. It's just the CFO doing their job, mostly. Also ... stocks are quite expensive right now by most measures, so I'm not sure how much buybacks make sense in that context at this moment.