Corporate America spent much of this year celebrating the tax cut that Republicans handed them by dumping truckloads of money onto their investors. Mostly, they did this by spending record amounts of money on stock buybacks.
Now that stocks are crashing—the S&P 500 is down about 17 percent from its September peak—some companies are looking like they overpaid. The Wall Street Journal reports Thursday that the shares Apple purchased are now worth $9 billion less than when they bought them. Wells Fargo and Citigroup also repurchased shares that have declined in value by billions.*
https://slate.com/business/2018/12/apple-stock-buyback-investment-chart.html
