Today, the SEC announced new Rules requiring wide disclosure relating to corporate redemption of shares.  Buy-backs are huge (in 2021, they totaled $950 Billion), and have been occasionally questioned in the liberal press as events that wrongly reward investors, while the purchase price paid for redeemed shares might have been better used to enhance the company.

Disclosure now is required from redeeming corporations about the obvious (what was redeemed at what price), the suspicious (what did insiders, officers and directors do with their shares around the time of redemption) and perhaps most interesting, the corporate objective for the buyback, and how the redemption decision was reached.

It will be interesting to see how companies explain why returning money to investors was smarter than investing in company growth. Investor return is, after all, the object of investment….