The dividend of the road for share buybacks?

One of the scariest aspects of the current debt crisis is the surfeit of cash on corporate balance sheets.

The C Suite squad wants the rest of us to believe this virtuous behaviour, apropos debt, is a result of their careful and diligent husbandry of capital resources and sensible cost-cutting, all with a little help from their spreadsheet-wielding management consulting friends. The rest of us know the real truth, which is these mountains of cash are largely the result of serial under-investment in new capex & capacity and the elimination of large sections of the workforce. Obviously, all this spare cash could eventually find its way into the pockets of the C Suite brigade via perverse i...