As John Authers recently pointed out, “For much of the last decade, companies buying their own shares have accounted for all net purchases. The total amount of stock bought back by companies since the 2008 crisis even exceeds the Federal Reserve’s spending on buying bonds over the same period as part of quantitative easing. Both pushed up asset prices.” Let me rephrase that: there have been essentially no other buyers of equities over the past decade besides the companies themselves and they’ve spent over $4 trillion at it, even as liquidity has fallen to record lows.
