No. of Recommendations: 10
The only motivation for this wheeze at a big profitable firm is to screw and fool shareholders by treating compensation as a shell game, taking the real (and gigantic, in the case of stock comp) economic cost of the comp substantially off the books and flattering short term results.
I saw some numbers of market wide share buy backs vs actual share count. Buy backs are in too many cases doing nothing to improve the shareholders piece of the pie, just keeping it from getting noticeably diluted, while management walks off with more and more of the company. It is so pervasive that it has become expected and BRK is the exception for being transparent.
