The Atlantic has the article The Stock-Buyback Swindle.

To ward off hostile takeovers, boards started firing CEOs who didn’t deliver near-term stock-price gains. The rolling of a few big heads—including General Motors’ Robert Stempel in 1992 and IBM’s John Akers in 1993—drove home the point to CEOs: They had better start thinking about shareholder value.

If their conversion to the enemy faith was at first grudging, CEOs soon found a reason to love it. One of the main tenets of shareholder value is that managers’ interests should be aligned with shareholders’ interests. To accomplish this goal, boards began granting CEOs large blocks of company stock and stock options.

The shift in compensation was intended to encourage CEOs to maximize returns for shareholders. In practice, something else happened. The rise of stock incentives coincided with a loosening of SEC rules governing stock buybacks. Three times before (in 1967, ’70, and ’73), the agency had considered such a rule change, and each time it had deemed the dangers of insider “market manipulation” too great. It relented just before CEOs began acquiring ever greater portfolios of their own corporate stock, making such manipulation that much more tantalizing.

Excellent article that explains how rules changes are just reinforcing this pernicious trend. These changes to rules make it impossible for a CEO not to use stock buy backs if she or he wants to keep her or his job.

If you are interested to learn how your money and wealth are being stolen, reading this article will go a long way in furthering your educationi.