More Dividends Please
Bloomberg View notes that US corporations hold $2 trillion in cash.
The site argues that corporate managers ought to be kicking the cash back out to shareholders.
Instead:
"Total dividends paid in the first quarter of 2011 fell from a year earlier. The average dividend yield on Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies is about 1.9 percent. That’s half the level of the 1980s and a fifth less than in the 1990s."
Companies are using the money to buy back their shares, creating a spurious appearance of increasing corporate value by using shareholder money to make shares more scarce.
Better for them to kick the money out, and let shareholders buy the shares they want.
If the devil finds work for idle hands, CEOs find mischievous use for hoards of other people's money.