IBM authorizes 4 billion dollars for a stock repurchase.

84% of all stocks are owned by the top 10% of household and the top 1% of households own about roughly 40% of stocks.

Investors are sweeping up shares in MasterCard 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 dollar buyback.

We make moral and value decisions with how we structure our tax code and this is yet another example

where we're shortchanging workers

where we're adding to the wealth disparities in our country and ultimately weakening the

strength of our democracy as a whole.

Do you know it's a big year for buybacks as well. Now Goldman Sachs

estimates that buybacks could hit a record one trillion dollars this year.

From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with

Nick Hanauer, a conversation about how capitalism actually works. I'm Nick Henauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.

So Nick, in the last episode we started a conversation about the purpose of the corporation

we talked about stock buybacks about shareholder maximization,

and about corporate governance.

In this episode, we're going to move on a little bit

to policy solutions, and you've

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