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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

"Keep it in cash" isn't looking like such a bad idea right now.

Sure, but that still wasn't the best option.

1. We had the sharpest market drop in history. Models could predict this, but while this drop is say a 1 in 30 year event across all industries, this drop for certain sectors (like airlines) is more of a 1 in 100 year event. If companies all planned all the time for once in a century events, global growth would be much slower.

2. Most companies in most industries are still better for having done share buybacks. We're only back at 2017 stock levels. They've been buying back since 2010. The best return most companies got for their cash was doing this, and I'm not sure that's changed with this downturn. Most companies will be back to normal pricing in a year's time from now anyway, and their share buybacks will still have been as brilliant of a decision as ever.

United went bankrupt in 2002. Air Canada, 2003. US Airways, 2004. Northwest and Delta in 2005. American in 2011. This pandemic may be a once-in-a-century event, but "we're out of money" is not, especially for airlines.

Having just finished "Black Swan" I am convinced companies need to start thinking that these "once in a lifetime" events are actually pretty common. Having cash on hand to weather a storm should be mandated by shareholders.

Not to mention the airline industry in particular routinely has adverse events that affect it. Just to run down a list of random things airline execs should be considering as "normal" risks they need to plan some buffer for, all of which have caused significantly impactful events on a regular basis for the industry, even to the point of causing some airlines to go bankrupt and/or be bought out by competitors over time:

* Government regulation impacts

* Union strikes

* Aircraft groundings due to faulty (or less-long-lived than anticipated) parts

* Ticket search companies undercutting their profits

* Oil (and thus fuel, one of their main costs) price surges

* Wars and conflicts that decrease travel demand or cause large unsafe-to-fly zones over the world.

* Volcano eruptions that fill regions of the globe's sky with engine-killing volcanic dust.

* Terrorism (the reduction in passenger demand in the wake, groundings while implementing new safeguards, related lawsuits in the aftermath, etc)

* Now-obviously: Pandemics (but even smaller epidemics have shown effects several times in the past couple of decades!)

If that is the lesson that businesses learn from this, the recession after this will last a lot longer than it needs to, as companies hoard more emergency cash than they need, instead of it flowing through the rest of the economy. A better solution is to cover higher likelihood emergencies and for governments to step in (as they are doing) for very rare emergencies like this one.

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