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A stock buyback 'bonanza' is on the horizon: GS

With corporate cash balances looking flush again as businesses recover from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldman Sachs strategist David Kostin thinks a stock buyback explosiion is coming. Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi weighs in.

Video transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right. Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live on this Monday morning. Brian Sozzi, David Kostin out over the weekend, as he always is, learning about the latest goings on in the equity markets. And Kostin and the team over at Goldman Sachs looking at buybacks as a potential bid in the market. Buybacks, of course, pretty much dried up in 2020. They were a big story of the post-crisis market rally. And now our old friend, the stock repurchase program, is back.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, love me when strategists come out with these big predictions of any kind. That's what Kostin's doing here, Myles and Julie, predicting a 35% increase in share buybacks this year and a 5% pop in 2022. And buybacks are already off to a very, very strong start so far this year, Kostin noting, US buybacks through April up $484 billion. That's double the pace at this point last year, which would make sense, because at this point last year, companies were suspending dividends and cutting buyback plans at the height of the pandemic. But ultimately, the pace this year, this is the quickest pace of buybacks since 2016. At that time, we had about $400 billion in buybacks.

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And you sift through the results so far this earnings season, companies are saying, we are going to be back big in the market. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon signaling more big buyback plans in the months ahead. Apple, top of mind. They came out in their earnings release, said $90 billion buyback. That's now in the cards as well. And a lot of other companies are out there now finding-- provided these companies are fundamentally sound, they have the cash, they have some form of stability in their businesses, they are coming out here and saying to investors, we're going to start giving this cash back, maybe not to the extent we were in 2018 and 2019, but maybe a little bit more than what they did in 2020.

MYLES UDLAND: Well, and look, Sozzi, I know you love ways to play the tax changes that could be coming up. If you are indeed going to see a higher capital gains tax, as a management team, it is going to benefit, in general, more of your shareholders to repurchase more stock than to pay dividends. So maybe an additional source of bid there from the corporate side, which, as you mentioned, has really been a big part of the market story over the last decade or--