Pierre R. Breber
Vice President & Chief Financial Officer at Chevron
Thanks, Jeanine. The buyback rate of $10 billion is a company record, and previous highest buyback rate was back in 2008. And as you say, we want to maintain it across the commodity cycle. So we're very in tune with what our mid cycle cash flow capabilities are. We showed at our Investor Day low case of $50 Brent and so that we can maintain the buyback for multiple years, even though $50 is notionally right around the breakeven for covering both our dividend and our capital. And then, of course, we showed the high case of $75 where buybacks were, in fact, higher than the current $10 billion guidance.
And we could buy back at that point in time, it was more than 25% of the company, it's a little bit less based on the current stock price. So that's exactly how we're thinking about it. To Neil's question and the macro, it was just two years ago today on this earnings call, that Chevron was the only company to show a two year stress test at $30 Brent. And that was a real stress test. And we showed that we could maintain the dividend, invest in the business for long term value. We certainly reduced some short cycle capital. And yes, we would take on some debt, but we'd have a debt ratio that would still be very manageable. And in fact, would be not far from where many of our competitors were entering the COVID crisis.
So as Mike says, we're mindful of the cycles that are in our business, we have to plan and manage for them. Again, we could have we can afford a much bigger buyback program next quarter. We don't you know, Jeanine, a net debt ratio under 11% is not what we're targeting. I mean that's just how the math works. We grew our dividend 6% earlier this year. Our dividend is up nearly 20% since COVID, while many in the industry cut their dividends during the last couple of years. Our investment organic investment is up more than 30% versus last year. When you include our announced acquisitions, total investment is up 50%. So clearly, we're investing, as Mike has said, to grow both our traditional and new energy businesses.
And we paid down debt, and we've been increasing our buyback as we've seen the strength of this upcycle and the likely duration of it increase, but the cycle will turn, and we'll continue to do buybacks. And so we want to set the buyback at a rate that we can manage in, not only at our mid cycle cash flow generation capability, but even when it goes below that. Again, we're going to there's going to be a time where we're going to be buying back shares, and we'll be doing it on the balance sheet because we want to relever back closer to that 20% to 25% net debt ratio range that I've talked about.