The Treasury, the Fed, and Warren Buffet have been the only buyers
in this meltdown and have been largely focused on financial companies.
Meanwhile the rest of the market has gone down 30% year to date and very few, if any, stocks have been spared.
What do we look for next? Does the market just keep going down
endlessly? What will bring this to an end? Clearly not government
intervention. While possibly necessary (we’ll see), the splurge has
clearly not put an end to selling in the markets.
We need to see more Warren Buffetts stepping up. And my bet is they
will eventually. And they will be corporations buying back their own
stock, large private equity and buyout firms doing going private
transactions with all equity cap structures, and possibly foreign
companies seeking bargain acquisitions in the US.
What’s interesting, as Howard pointed out repeatedly on twitter yesterday, is that corporations have not yet stepped up to stock buybacks.
Microsoft announced last month that they plan to buy back $40bn in stock over the next five years. They have $25bn in cash and short term investments and are currently earning about $20bn per year in operating cash flow. Microsoft’s stock
is trading at about 11x operating cash flow. It’s market cap is $227bn
and institutions own 60% of it, meaning there is about $130bn of $MSFT
stock in the hands of institutions. If Microsoft wanted to, at the
current price, it could purchase all $130bn of that stock from
institutions with its current cash balance plus operating earnings over
the next five years. If Microsoft is confident about its business
prospects going forward, it should be an aggressive buyer of its own
stock at these levels. And maybe it is. It’s stock is only down 3% in
the past month while the S&P has been down 15%.
What about Google? $GOOG
is down almost 50% year to date and the company is valued at $115bn.
Institutions own roughly 60% of its stock, roughly $70bn of it. Google
is earning about $7bn of operating cash per year and has $13bn of cash
and short term investments on hand. So it would take Google longer to
buy back all the stock institutions own, more like eight to ten years.
But still, that’s a lot of purchasing power and the market is asking
the same question Howard did yesterday.
The silence of $goog into this meltdown is just as deafening with all their cash. I am not going to be run over.
In
bad bear markets, like we are in, investors look to corporations to
defend their stock and Google has not yet shown an interest in doing
that. That’s something to look for. When you net out Google’s cash,
it’s trading at $100bn, a mere 12x operating cash flow. That’s value
territory.
Let’s look at News Corp.
Rupert Murdoch’s company, the best managed media company out there, is
down 56% in the past year and is now trading at a mere six times
operating cash flow. News Corp is also about 60% institutionally owned.
So that means Rupert could buy out his external investors with four
years of his cash flow. But we have yet to see him do that.
I could go on and on. Apple
is worth $67bn after you back out the $20bn of cash they have on hand.
It earns over $5bn a year. That’s another value stock right there.
And those are some of the best US companies right there. The list goes on and on. Starbucks trades at 7x cash flow, Walmart trades at 10x cash flow, AT&T trades at 4x cash flow, and Comcast trades at 6x cash flow.
You could buy all of America’s best corporations for somewhere
around eight to ten times cash flow. Someone is going to start doing
this.
Maybe it will be the large private equity and buyout firms who have
been stuck on the sidelines while the debt markets have been closed for
the past year. If good companies get cheap enough, they can buy them
with their cash, without debt, and own them for however long the
markets take to work the issues out.
Or foreign companies will come in. I am particularly interested in the asian companies. Will a company like Dell
be an attractive acquisition for an asian manufacturer flush with cash?
It’s only trading at 5x cash flow after you back out the cash on hand.
I read this history of the panic of 1873 yesterday after seeing a twitter post by Mary Hodder
that referenced it. It’s worth reading. There are two really
interesting points in it. The first is that panic was precipitated in
some measure by the US’ emerging prowess as a player in the global
economy and a lower cost one at that:
Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new
international competitor who drastically undersold them. The
19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for
Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest.
They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to
export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of
wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872
kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America’s
heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came
in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region’s
assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic.
Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial
Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs
threatened European trade and a European way of life.
But possibly even more interesting was who emerged as the winners of the panic of 1873:
The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the
largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with
guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the
railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus
McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to
finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that
relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire.
As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and
Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The
Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was
concerned, had begun.
We
have yet to see the Carnegies, McCormicks, and Rockefellers of China,
India, Russia, and the Middle East emerge as capitalists on a global
scale. But with prime assets like I mentioned above on sale at bargain
basement prices, it’s just a matter of time until we will.
Eventually this market meltdown will be over and stability will
return. But things will not be the same. There will be big winners and
big losers. We have already seen many of the big losers emerge, but we
have not yet seen the big winners emerge. I think we know where to look
for them though.
(Read more from Fred, by visiting his blog)
