What The Heck’s Happening To Our Share Buyback Boom?

(By Wolf Richter) Going down the drain, putting this wondrous stock market at risk? Companies in the S&P 500 spent about $3 trillion since 2011 to buy back their own shares, often with borrowed money. It’s part of a noble magic called financial engineering, the simplest way to goose the all-important metric of earnings per…