May 10, 1993
"Where Have All the Takeovers Gone?"
San Jose Mercury News
By Timothy Taylor
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TAKEOVERS, leveraged buyouts, and mergers and acquisitions were the dragons
of the corporate world just a few years ago. The issue was whether their fiery
breath was goading top executives to work harder, or just incinerating America's
economic future.
But takeovers haven't caused much huffing and puffing in the 1990s. Between
1980 and 1988, the number of mergers and corporate transactions per year nearly
tripled, and the dollar value of those deals increased sevenfold. Since then,
the number and value of deals has fallen back to the levels that prevailed in
the early 1980s.
Like astronomers after the passage of a comet, we can now look back over the
trail of takeovers, trying to figure out where they came from, where they went,
and whether their passage portends good or evil for the U.S. economy.
Takeovers were often portrayed by the media as a sort of clash of the titans,
featuring struggles between morally neutral demigods like T. Boone Pickens, Carl
Icahn, Michael Milken, and others. But from a more functional, less dramatic point
of view, the deal-making of the 1980s accomplished one main task: It led to corporations
paying out money to shareholders.
This happened in a variety of ways. In the case of takeovers, an acquiring
company payed the shareholders of the firm it was gobbling up. In the case of
a leveraged buyout, borrowed money was used to purchase stock and take control
of a company. Many firms reacted to the threat of takeovers by repurchasing their
own shares, thus transferring funds to their own shareholders directly.
"Takeovers and financial restructurings were devices the financial markets
used to discipline corporate managers and pressure them to pay out more money
to shareholders and other investors," writes Margaret M. Blair of the Brookings
Institution in "The Deal Decade," a recently published collection of
essays about takeovers and leveraged buyouts in the 1980s.
Blair points out that the real interest rate on safe investments like government
securities was very high in the mid-1980s; for example, Treasury bills were paying
12 percent interest in 1984, while inflation was just 4 percent. The availability
of such high, safe interest rates put pressure on corporations to pay out funds
to shareholders.
The public distrusts takeovers and financial deal-making. One reason is that
many people have a visceral distaste for finance. In addition, the efficiency
benefits of takeovers are dispersed and unannounced. No company puts out a press
release that says: "Thank heavens for takeovers. We've been terribly inefficient,
but because our CEO is terrified of being bought out and losing his job, we've
pulled our act together."
Takeovers do deserve some credit for the strong performance of the stock market
and the rise in productivity since the late 1980s. They focused management's attention
on taking care of business; or as Blair puts it, "the specific sin of management
that the financial markets were eager to correct was managers' tendency to build
empires."
But markets can easily supply too much of a good thing, which seems to have
happened with takeovers.
As the 1980s progressed, the deals got bigger and bigger, culminating in the
mammoth $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co.
back in 1989. The acquiring firms paid higher and higher prices, and the economic
gains diminished. Deals were driven more by those who controlled the creative
financial instruments -- junk bonds, auction rate preferred stock, master limited
partnerships and more -- than by the actual business managers. Of course, a takeover
gone wrong is just as economically destructive as any other misguided investment:
people lose jobs, plants shut down, investment is cut.
Just as troubling is how takeovers have affected implicit relationships between
companies and their home communities, their middle management and their suppliers.
Even the most sophisticated economy runs to some extent on trust, that is, on
long-term commitments that are not written into formal contracts. But after economic
dislocations of recent years, communities, workers and suppliers must hesitate
before making any long-term commitments to a company that could be bought out
next month or next year.
By the early 1990s, takeovers were on the downslope. Lower interest rates meant
that corporations no longer felt as much pressure to generate immediate returns.
As the deals became less profitable, and as recession hit in 1991, less money
was available for financing takeovers. Under pressure from companies concerned
about becoming takeover targets, and with the support of citizens suspicious of
wheeler-dealers, many states passed laws to assist firms in fighting off unwanted
acquisitions.
My guess, for what it's worth, is that the cumulative effect of the takeovers
of the 1980s, lumping together the good with the bad, was positive for the economy.
To put it another way, I'd rather have private investors risking their own capital
in mergers and acquisitions, and sometimes making mistakes, then to have all such
deals forbidden, or to have politicians or courts deciding who will own and run
America's companies.
WHAT GOES UP... |
The chart shows the value of mergers and corporate transactions
for a five- year period.
|
1987 |
$344 billion |
1988 |
$596 billion |
1989 |
$461 billion |
1990 |
$249 billion |
1991 |
$176 billion |
Source: Securities Data Company, The Merger Yearbook. Data for 1992 not yet
published. |
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