2015-10-15wolfstreet.com

So Wal-Mart has faced the same difficulties in this Fed-designed economy for years. Wal-Mart's primary customers, the lower 80% on the income scale, have practically no savings, and every month is a battle to make ends meet. It is hard to increase sales when your customers are this strung-out -- not just in the US but in its markets around the globe ...

But thanks to these giant buyback programs and the megatons of Wall Street hype associated with them, and thanks to QE, shares have climbed 75% from 2011 to January 2015... since January, the math has stopped working. Today, Wal-Mart projected a worse earnings debacle than before but offered an even bigger share buyback program than before. Share buybacks pumped up the shares back then successfully. But they haven't recently. And they didn't today. Something changed.

... if Wal-Mart is a harbinger of how financial engineering fails to boost share prices of revenue-and-earnings challenged companies -- which includes much of the S&P 500 -- then more stocks, one after the other or perhaps together, will fall off their precariously swaying perch.



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