In 2004, the U.S. Congress passed the “American Jobs Creation Act” which allowed a U.S. company to elect, for one taxable year, an 85% dividends-received deduction with respect to qualifying cash dividends from its foreign subsidiaries, when such dividends were in excess of a base period amount and were reinvested in the U.S. pursuant […]

In a major article on March 18, 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the possibility that corporate executives were back-dating their stock options to achieve greater profits when these options were exercised. The article did not mention stock buybacks, nor the link between stock buybacks and the legalized […]

Federal Reserve national flow of funds accounts for the years 1995-2004 show that corporate tangible assets, as a percent of total corporate assets, dropped from 56.7% in 1995 to 49.7% in 2004. Tangible corporate assets would have had to been $1.4 trillion greater in 2004 to represent the same percentage of total assets as in […]