Why Did Bank of America Pay Back the Money?
by ilene - December 4th, 2009 2:18 pm
Why Did Bank of America Pay Back the Money?
Courtesy of James Kwak of Baseline Scenario
Everybody knows by now that Bank of America is buying back the $45 billion of preferred stock that the government currently owns. While the reason why they are doing this is obvious, I’m going to pretend it isn’t for a few paragraphs.
Buying back stock costs money — real cash money. Why would a company ever do such a thing? The textbook answer is that a company should do it if it doesn’t have investment opportunities that yield more than its cost of capital. The cash in its bank account, in some sense, belongs to its shareholders, who expect a certain return. If the bank can’t earn that return with the cash, it should return it to the shareholders. In this case, though, the interest rate on the preferred shares is only 5%, which is far lower than usual cost of equity. In fact, Bank of America just issued $19 billion of new stock in order to help buy back the government’s preferred stock. The cost of that new equity (in corporate finance terms) is certainly higher than 5%. In other words, Bank of America just threw money away.
In practice, companies buy back stock in order to increase their earnings per share. Fewer shares outstanding and the same earnings mean higher earnings per share and a higher stock price. In theory, this shouldn’t work: the benefit of having fewer shares should be exactly balanced by the fact that the company is now worth less (because it has, say, $45 billion less cash than it had yesterday). But in practice, it seems to work, probably because of signaling. But that doesn’t make sense in this case, either, since these are preferred shares that Bank of America is buying back, which have no claim on earnings. In effect, Bank of America is paying off cheap (5%) debt it doesn’t have to pay off — and to do that, it’s issuing new common shares, which will dilute existing shareholders.
Paying back its TARP money also has the effect of making Bank of America weaker. From a liquidity perspective, it now has about $20-25 billion ($45 billion minus $19 billion raised from new equity minus a few billion from other asset sales) less cash than it
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.
