The Capital Return

What this pack runs.

Every acquisition gets a post-mortem. Every large capital project gets one. A buyback gets none, for two reasons that are not negligence: nobody keeps the average price paid, because treasury executes against an authorization and no report asks for the price; and an authorization is a permission rather than a decision, so no alternative is ever attached to it. A decision with no recorded price and no recorded alternative cannot be reviewed, and so it is not. This pack computes what the program commits a year, against operating profit and at the company's own multiple; assembles the average price paid and marks the program at today's price; then computes what the same money would have earned inside at the return the company's own plan already assumes, subtracts whatever the repurchase gained, and adds what the company later paid to raise money back. It stops on five conditions: nobody recorded the average price paid, nobody has said what the money would have earned inside, nobody has said how long the program has run, nobody has said what the shares are worth today, and the raise has not been recorded either way.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.