It is funny that the upstarts of days gone by are the steady freddies of today, but this has certainly happened to Cisco. And therefore it was no surprise to us that Cisco repatriated and paid taxes on its huge overseas cash hoard in fiscal 2018 – that is that big loss you see in fiscal Q2 in the chart above when it had close to $75 billion in the bank – and then bought a tremendous amount of shares back from Wall Street. Since the Great Recession, the share buyback tab has been pretty heavy at a net $76.1 billion (Cisco also distributes shares from time to time), but from the summer of 2017, after Chuck Robbins had been at the helm of the networking giant for two years, until the beginning of the Great Infection this time last year, the spending was much deeper – a net $42.1 billion over nearly three years.