RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:KelvinCountryBoy69, Yeah my friend lives in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia on Wright's Lake near Halifax. She loves it! The maritimes are beautiful! She moved there from Toronto and never, ever wants to move back.
I remember an interview that I saw with Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, former underboss to John Gotti in the Gambino crime family. He said that everything is mafias. When he fought in Vietnam he considered himself as a hitman for the American edtablishment mafia. He wondered why he was killing North Vietnamese because they never attacked the US. But that's what the boss wanted.
Here it's just another mafia that rules by force. Nothing else. But I stay out of the politics here. Yet my Peruvian friend asks a good question: Which is better? A corrupt, wasteful democracy or an efficient dictatorship like in Singapore or what Peru had under Fujimori? Friedrich Hayek said that the root cause of all economic distress is the waste of capital. Capital has to be efficiently deployed in order to generate even more capital and abundance.
Through corruption trillions are lost as wasted capital that could have been better deployed growing the private sector in what Trump calls "sh*t holes". He's right! I see it in real life. They have an inept mafia running things here and in many countries. What we need is a mafia boss like Carlo Gambino who was a very skilled manager they say. Xi of China seems to be a highly talented, efficient mafia boss. Putin? I'm starting to wonder.
Free cash flow? What to do with it? Rewarding shareholders with dividends would boost sp as well. Stock buy backs don't always have a positive effect on sp according to Warren Buffet because the cash comes out of assets and you end up reducing shareholders' equity for a given amount of liabilities as per the accounting equation: Total Assets = Liabilities + Shareholders Equity. You reduce assets by buying back and retiring shares, then if liabilities remain the same then shareholders equity must decrease in order to maintian the equality.
Heck why not? Keep enough free cash flow to fund growth and give the balance back to shareholders. Hopefully interest rates don't go crazy though. Lots of recession talk these days as well. Plus Dereck Evans, CEO of Meg energy said that the greatest risk facing Canadian oil & gas is regulatory risk. You never know what the Liberal- NDP mafia will do next.