Can buybacks make sense in a crisis?

By rickColosimo / June 9, 2009 / Comments Off on Can buybacks make sense in a crisis?

Just recently, we published another post regarding stock buybacks and how the math is the math: you can change your risk profile, but in any case, at some point the usage of cash to buy stock makes sense as a low-cost way of returning value to shareholders. Sure, there are commentators who complain that a…

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More MSFT cash-usage ideas….

By rickColosimo / June 2, 2009 /

[NB: this post was started quite some time ago, and it recently re-surfaced in our ‘drafts’ folder. Sorry for the delay, but we believe that the underlying issues are still interesting and how companies use cash is more, not less, relevant in a turbulent economy.] Business Week ran a short piece profiling the investment analysis…

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Bailout: cause & effect

By rickColosimo / October 1, 2008 / Comments Off on Bailout: cause & effect

Larry Ribstein, who’s a law professor and pretty focused on corporate governance generally, just described the bailout in some pretty straightforward terms. WARNING: we are not typically focused on macroeconomics except in scenario planning. However, we see strong tendrils of the situation that are really about investor expectations, the efficiency of the market, and the…

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Excess capital and negative spread

By rickColosimo / March 29, 2006 / Comments Off on Excess capital and negative spread

Geoffrey Colvin, the star of our last post, is once again delivering basic finance concepts to the masses in his all-too-short article on the AT&T- BellSouth merger. Believe us, basic is the level that many corporate finance & management teams are working at, so Colvin is doing shareholders a favor (we can assume a broad…

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