What am I doing wrong

I have two public corps and I am trying to retact shares on one I go to repurches shares and it says corp retract order but it doesn't retract those shares it buys them for my country

Yes there is a differance and I want to be able to retract or maybe create new shares and the game is not letting me

well first off this should be in the help or beginners section

I posted in the help no answer

It buys them for your country, because your country was the original owner of those shares. So they were bought back when you retracted the order. You can click "perform a public offering" to issue new shares.

But you used to be able to spend corp money to reduce the number of overal shares that is what I want to do and why can't I do that

You're right. Retracting shares is a different thing than the majority share owner buying shares, but unfortunately this game doesn't allow us to do that.

Why doesn't it anymore it used to

Oh did it? I wasn't aware of that.

Nothing is changed in the share market for a very long period. (except for some parameters that regulate IPO activity).
The country can retract shares and can try to purchase all the shares of the corporation it does not own.

In the real world, corporations can purchase their own shares back.
This is not a major feature in the real world and does not make sense in the game.
If a corporation has 100M shares and it owns them all, or 50 million shares and it owns them all, does not make a difference.

In fact, we could extend the share split and reverse split feature to private corporations and have the number of shares depend on their value.