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November 14, 2018 12:21 pm PST

Apple's world-beating financial engineering is teaching the corporate world how to exploit Trump's tax cuts

After Trump's tax-cuts and forgiveness program, Apple repatriated $260 billion it had stashed in offshore tax havens (or, more truthfully, had funneled through offshore tax-havens to buy onshore financial products that were notionally held offshore); this made Apple the leading beneficiary of the Trump tax forgiveness program.

Apple used that money to continue its streak of record-setting stock buybacks, which which the company gooses its share price and allows investors to cash out, diverting money from worker compensation and R&D to financial engineering.

Apple's stock-buybacks are so aggressive that they have lured in Berkshire Hathaway, famous for "patient investing" -- Apple CEO Tim Cook initially touted this as vindication that the company still had the confidence of "value investors," until Berkshire CEO Warren Buffet clarified that his stake in Apple was based on the expectation that the company would continue to use financial engineering to reward investors who brought nothing to the table except the ability to move share prices.

Cook has since suggested that the buybacks will create public value because of the capital gains that Apple investors will pay when they cash out -- but of course, Trump's tax cuts offer massively preferential tax rates for people who earn money through capital gains, shifting the US tax burden onto waged workers who earn their money by making things that other people use.

Just after the announcement in May 2018 that Buffett had purchased an additional 74 million Apple shares, interviewer David Rubenstein asked Apple CEO Tim Cook: Are you pleased to have him as your shareholder? Cook responded: Im overjoyed.

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