This week the fast casual change of poltlay mexican grill announced that it was hiking menu prices by roughly 4%

allegedly to cover the cost of raising its workers wages. That is the reasoning, according to

CEO Brian Nichol, who last year received a $24 million raise. That's $38 million a year in total

salary and compensation. And that makes Nichol our trickle-down clown of the week.

It's especially clownish considering that Nichol Oslo announced that they would be spending

$153 million on stock buybacks and as long time listeners of the podcast know stock buybacks are one

of our pet peeves. We've talked about the pernicious effect of stock buybacks and number of times on

the podcast. But one of my favorite conversations was with Senator Corey Booker, where we give a

little introductory lesson on the topic and talked about how corporations like Chipotle might share

their gains with all their workers instead of just their shareholders. Given this Chipotle news,

we hope you enjoy this refresher.

IBM authorizes $4 billion for a stock repurchase.

84% of all stocks are owned by the top 10% of households and the top 1% of households own about

roughly 40% of stocks. Investors are sweeping up shares in master cards today that comes after

the credit card company approved a $1 billion stock buyback. From the point of view of Wall Street,

we could literally enslave those people and if the profits went up that would be righteous

for everyone. Huntington bank shares announcing a $1.07 billion buyback. We make moral and value

decisions with how we structure our tax code and this is yet another example where we're

short-changing workers, where we're adding to the wealth disparities in our country and ultimately

weakening the strength of our democracy as a whole. You know it's a big year for buybacks as well.

The Goldman Sachs estimates that buybacks could hit a record of $1 trillion this year.

From the offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork economics,

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