In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall looks at the mess the new Boeing management has inherited and what they may need to do to be seen to be fixing it:
“Boeing 521 427”by pmbell64 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Which brings us to another piece of stock market wisdom, about trying to catch a falling knife. A dangerous occupation and the reference is to trying to call the bottom on some stock that has just had a disaster. At some point, surely, the tumble in price will stop and there will be a bounce. Well, yes, or perhaps maybe, for we must not forget that that proper bottom is that end of life – the bankruptcy – price of nothing. For everything that isn’t about to go bust then yes, there’s a price at which buying in the face of everyone else’s panic can be highly profitable. The question being, well, what is about to go bust? Toys R Us did, after all. Actually, so have quite a lot of retailers just recently. There was no above zero price at which it was sensible to buy in.
So, some stock crashes in price, should we buy in? After all, there is that phenomenon known as the dead cat bounce – anything will bounce at least once if you drop it from high enough. The question becomes one of, well, is this crash a result of something that can be reversed, or perhaps something that’s not going to be terminal for the organisation? Or is this just the start of that realisation process that the organisation is coming to the end of its life and going to that final resting place of a zero dollar valuation?
[…]
So, Boeing and the 737 Max. The changes in airframe had the unfortunate consequence of diving a couple of the planes into the ground. We’ve had a drip of stories about how the development process wasn’t all we would wish it to be. The FAA isn’t going to let it back up into the air until the summer at earliest. The Dreamliner seems to be having demand problems and, well, things aren’t looking good.
But is this the start of some spiral to zero? No, don’t be daft. Partly because the American government simply would not allow that. Boeing’s too much part of the backdrop of the US economy for that to be left to happen. The military business is also of significant value whatever happens to the civil aviation side. And of course the numbers we’re talking about here could be painful to stock holders – they are already in part of course – but at the very worst we’re looking at some tens of billions of problem here. That’s just not enough to drive a company Boeing’s size down to zero. Not in this decade at least, given that the only reasonable competition is Airbus. Global duopolies don’t end that way.
So, at this point there’s an argument to say that trying to catch that falling knife of the Boeing stock price might be worthwhile. So, when might that be? At which point another idea, kitchen sinking. This is when a new management team decides to make themselves look good by declaring how bad things had got under the previous one. Absolutely anything and everything that looks like, it might even smell of a problem in the future is taken out and declared. Provisions are made for this problem on this contract, for that problem that might occur over there, add a bit more and then heck, why not, double it! This has, assuming the company survives this balance sheet massacre, the obvious effect of making the new management team look good over the years. Not just because everything starts from this new low place. But also because many of those provisions – those over-provisions – won’t be needed and can be written back from reserves into the P&L.
