By Matt Egan<\/p>\n
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It's raining stock buybacks on Wall Street — thanks to President Trump's massive corporate tax cuts.<\/p>\n
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The White House has celebrated the tax cut bonuses unveiled by the likes of Walmart (WMT), Bank of America (BAC) and Disney (DIS).<\/p>\n
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Yet shareholders, not workers, are far bigger direct winners from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.<\/p>\n
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American companies have lavished Wall Street with $171 billion of stock buyback announcements so far this year, according to research firm Birinyi Associates. That's a record-high for this point of the year and more than double the $76 billion that Corporate America disclosed at the same point of 2017.<\/p>\n
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Wall Street loves buybacks because they tend to boost the share price in part by inflating a key measure of profitability. In just the past three days, Cisco (CSCO), Pepsi (PEP) and drug maker AbbVie (ABBV) have promised a total of $50 billion of buybacks.<\/p>\n
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“It's the largest ever — and nothing has really changed, except the tax law,” said Jeffrey Rubin, director of research at Birinyi Associates.<\/p>\n
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