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Remember that record pile of cash that U.S. companies have amassed over the past year? It’s finally being put to use:

For months, companies have been sitting on the sidelines with record piles of cash, too nervous to spend. Now they’re starting to deploy some of that money — not on hiring workers or building factories, but to prop up their share prices.

Sitting on these unprecedented levels of cash, U.S. companies are buying back their own stock in droves. So far this year, firms have announced they will purchase $273 billion of their own shares, more than five times as much compared with this time last year, according to Birinyi Associates.

….Some companies are buying back shares partly because they don’t want to invest in developing new products or services while consumer demand remains weak, analysts said. “They don’t know what they want to do with all the cash they’re sitting on,” said Zachary Karabell, president of RiverTwice Research.

I’ve always hated companies that do share buybacks. I know all the arguments in favor of it, but as far as I’m concerned it’s nothing more than a desperate effort to curry favor with shareholders and meet short-term bonus targets, carried out by a management team that has no idea how to grow their business. And if they don’t know how to grow their business, they should just announce that they’ve decided to adopt the corporate model of a regulated utility and start paying out regular, steadily growing dividends.

End of rant. Aside from all that, though, this particular news tells us once again that the most likely cause of slow economic growth right now isn’t structural, it’s cyclical. People aren’t buying stuff, and because of that businesses aren’t investing in growth. Increase demand, and they’ll start up again.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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