If it seems to you like corporate America — and here I mean big corporate America; the corporate “haves” — revels in a perennial “heads we win, tails someone besides shareholders loses” dynamic, you’re not wrong.

Historically, examples of the largest, most profitable US companies getting the short end of a given stick are few and far between. In the era of shareholder capitalism, which I date to the mid-1980s, it’s almost never the case.

Currently, corporate boardrooms are struggling with one of the more ambiguous operating environments since the pandemic. Ostensibly, that’s a bad thing, or at least not a good one, rampant uncertainty being anathema to decision-makers tasked with, for example, determining how to allocate spare cash.

But as we saw during COVID, big companies are adept not just at maneuvering through misfortune, but at capitalizing off catastrophe. In 2020, the C-suite took advantage of the Fed’s backstop for corporate credit to term out their debt profiles at rock-bottom rates. In 2021, they opportunistically raised prices to consumers above and beyond input cost inflation, a strategy made possible by sharply higher nominal wage growth and stimulus money, which allowed consumers to absorb price hikes.

As the figure above reminds you, the result for blue-chip corporates was record-low debt servicing costs and record high margins. Talk about lemonade from lemons.

Again, American capitalism is shareholder capitalism, which means no matter what’s going on in the world, shareholders are very likely to win. The first half of 2025 was yet another example: Yes, US equities careened to the brink of a bear market in April, but by late June, they were back to record highs in no small part thanks to buybacks.

Hat tip to Nomura’s Charlie McElligott who, early last month, noted that repurchase authorizations were running at a dead sprint. That was the perverse silver lining of Donald Trump’s trade war. As Charlie put it, “the single-most consequential flow from Trump trade policy shocks is the perverse dynamic where corporate uncertainty, perceived as a spending and investment downside catalyst, has instead led to an equities-bullish flow via massive share repurchase authorizations.”

McElligott reiterated that point during a live event with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast a few weeks later. “The thought was you’re gonna have corporates in a bad place. You either lose the top line, say because consumers are paying through the roof, or you have to absorb [the tariff] costs and your margins go lower,” he said. “But corporates have instead taken authorized buybacks to all-time highs.”

Again, it’s heads corporates win, tails someone besides shareholders loses. If you’re a shareholder and you’re not “tired of winning” yet, there’s good news: The dollar weakness precipitated by Trump’s policies should accrue to the benefit of the largest US multinationals too.

The figure on the left, below, from Morgan Stanley’s Michelle Weaver plots revisions breadth with the YoY change in the dollar gauge inverted on a three-month lead. It’s a good chart.

“Earnings revisions breadth, which tells us if sell-side analysts are broadly becoming more bullish or bearish, recently turned up after typical cycle lows,” Weaver wrote, noting that if Morgan Stanley’s house forecast for the dollar pans out, it’ll mean “substantial further upside to revisions breadth over the coming year.”

The figure on the right, from the same Morgan Stanley piece, is just a reminder: The S&P derives a far greater share of revenue from abroad than small-caps.

When the dollar’s weak, that foreign revenue “earn[s] a premium” when swapped back into dollars, Weaver went on, calling the tailwind from dollar weakness just one more reason to prefer large-caps which anyway have “higher-quality balance sheets, stronger pricing power and stronger supplier negotiation power.”

It’s hard to keep a giant US multinational down. They exist to turn a profit. So by God that’s what they’ll do.