Surprise, surprise, surprise...
CHASER: "“Why aren't the other hands up?” - Cohn, on Tuesday, after very few CEOs at the Wall Street Journal summit indicated they would use tax cuts to invest more.
The Post's Heather Long: "He laughed a little to lighten the mood, but it didn't cause many more hands to rise. Maybe the CEOs were tired. Maybe they didn't hear the question. It was a casual poll, but the lukewarm response seemed in tension with much of the public enthusiasm among corporations for a tax overhaul. The president and his senior team have kept saying that the tax plan would unleash business investment in the United States — new factories, more equipment and more jobs. But, perhaps as the informal poll suggested, there are reasons to be doubtful that a great business investment boom would materialize.
First, American businesses are already enjoying record profits. If they wanted to invest, they have plenty of money on hand to do it, says Howard Silverblatt, a senior analyst at S & P Dow Jones Indices, where he tracks all the financial decisions of S & P 500 companies. Second, executives themselves have indicated they probably won't use extra profits to invest. A Bank of America-Merrill Lynch survey this summer asked over 300 executives at major U.S. corporations what they would do after a “tax holiday” that would allow them to bring back money held overseas at a low tax rate. The No. 1 response? Pay down debt. The second most popular response was stock buybacks, where companies purchase some of their own shares to drive up the price. The third was mergers. Actual investments in new factories and more research were low on the list of plans for how to spend extra money."
— Voters are skeptical, too. NYT's Ben Casselman: "In a national survey of 9,504 adults conducted for The New York Times by the online polling firm SurveyMonkey, 78 percent of respondents said they did not believe they would receive a raise if their employer received a tax cut. Even many Republicans doubted they would benefit directly from a corporate tax cut: Roughly 70 percent of self-identified Republicans — and roughly 65 percent of people who said they strongly approved of President Trump’s performance in office — said they didn’t think they would get a pay increase."
Wasn't I just saying this yesterday?
Stock buy-backs.
What a crock.
Mergers.
That wonderful free market at work again where people get less and less choice for higher and higher prices.
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