In her Sunday business column in the New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson went after Big Pharma and the propensity for companies to buy back shares of their own stocks. Entitled “When Big Pharma Spends, Research Isn’t No. 1”, Morgenson focuses on an academic study that concludes that “from 2006 through 2015, the 18 drug companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index spent a combined $526 billion on buybacks and dividends” - an amount that exceeded by 11% the companies’ R&D spending of $465 billion during these years.
