Genuine question, I don't understand the economics of the stock market and as such I participate very little (probably to my detriment) I sort of figure the original theory went like this.
"We have an idea to run a for profit endeavor but do not have money to set it up. If you buy from us a portion of our future profit we will have the immediate funds to set up the business and you will get a payout for the indefinite future."
And the stock market is for third party buying and selling of these "shares of profit"
Under these conditions are not all stocks a sort of millstone of perpetual debt for the company and it would behoove them to remove that debt, that is, buyback the stock. Naively I assume this is a good thing.
If you don't understand a concept that's part of the stock market, reading the Investopedia article will go a long way. It's a nice site for basic overviews. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/buyback.asp
The short answer is that the trend of frequent stock buybacks as discussed here is not being used to "eliminate debt" (restore private ownership), it's being used to puff up the stock price as a non-taxable alternative to dividend payouts (simply increasing the stock price by reducing supply does not realize any gains, while paying stockholders "interest" directly is subject to income tax). This games the metric of "stock price", which is used as a proxy for all sorts of things including executive performance and compensation.
My view is that you don't want more layers. Chasing ever increasing share prices favor shareholders (limited amount of generally rich people) over customers (likely to be average people). The incentives get out of whack.
Genuine question, I don't understand the economics of the stock market and as such I participate very little (probably to my detriment) I sort of figure the original theory went like this.
"We have an idea to run a for profit endeavor but do not have money to set it up. If you buy from us a portion of our future profit we will have the immediate funds to set up the business and you will get a payout for the indefinite future."
And the stock market is for third party buying and selling of these "shares of profit"
Under these conditions are not all stocks a sort of millstone of perpetual debt for the company and it would behoove them to remove that debt, that is, buyback the stock. Naively I assume this is a good thing.