28 October 22
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Shell will buy back $4 billion worth of shares and increase its dividend by 15% after posting another gigantic quarterly profit thanks to strong oil and gas prices. The UK company posted net income of $9.45 billion in the third quarter, more than double the $4.1 billion it recorded a year ago. The result was driven by a strong performance in its oil exploration and production business, Shell said. The company’s stock at one point rallied more than 4% in London on Thursday as investors cheered the news. The additional buybacks will increase total share purchases for the year to $18.5 billion, some 10% of the company’s share capital.
It may come as some surprise to you all to learn that stock buybacks of this kind used to be illegal. The Security and Exchange Commission frowned on them. So did most economists. From the Harvard Business Review:
Why have U.S. companies done these massive buybacks? With the majority of their compensation coming from stock options and stock awards, senior corporate executives have used open-market repurchases to manipulate their companies’ stock prices to their own benefit and that of others who are in the business of timing the buying and selling of publicly listed shares. Buybacks enrich these opportunistic share sellers — investment bankers and hedge-fund managers as well as senior corporate executives — at the expense of employees, as well as continuing shareholders.
It will come as no surprise, however, to the regulars here at the shebeen to learn that it was under the Reagan Administration that the SEC adopted a new rule that immunized corporate CEOs from charges of stock manipulation that might arise from such buybacks. This made a lot of people very wealthy, and it also disfigured the economy the same way that all those old SEC fuddy-duddies said it would. In fact, a 1% tax on buybacks was central to the funding mechanism for the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act last August.
More to the point, Shell’s announcement makes anyone running on inflation and/or gas prices look like a fool. There’s been price gouging all over the lot since the pandemic broke out. Rep. Katie Porter already got an anti-gouging bill through the House.
But somewhere between Reagan’s election and now, Democratic candidates have lost whatever it was that allowed Franklin Roosevelt to welcome the hatred of the “malefactors of great wealth.” It ought to be easy to argue as ferociously against price gouging as the Republicans are arguing against inflation—easier, actually, because there’s substance behind an anti-gouging campaign and actual legislation aimed at correcting it; whereas the Republican railing about “inflation” uses the term as a mere conjuring word, and the people invoking it have no substantive plan to deal with it. But sometime over the last 40 years, as a national party the Democrats lost the ability to discuss class with the appropriate vigor and fire. This Shell story should be a live grenade to toss into every Republican congressional campaign. But I’m not sure the Democrats could even find the pin.
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