This could be an "uh oh" moment. The Financial Times reports today that M&A deal making is hitting the $83 billion level already this year — the busiest start for deal activity in a decade. According to the FT, "U.S. companies are estimated to have $1 trillion in cash on their balance sheets and are expected to come under increasing pressure to put those funds to work or return money to shareholders."
Well, we know where this is headed. Managements are generally loathe to return monies to the owners, and doing deals is ever so much more fun and dynamic. That is where the "uh oh" comes in. And where a good board needs to come in.
Let me turn to Robert Denham (pictured) to amplify.
Bob Denham, as you may recall, parachuted into Salomon Inc. with Warren Buffett to help stabilize the investment firm following its 1991 Treasury auction scandal. He had been a partner in the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, where he had worked for 20 years advising clients on strategic and financial issues, and to which he returned after resolving all the legal and regulatory issues that threatened to destroy Salomon and negotiating the sale of the investment firm to Travelers Corp. for almost $10 billion. When the dust cleared on all that travail, he recorded a set of thoughtful observations on corporate governance for a Directors & Boards article that we titled, "What Should We Expect from a Board?"
When it comes to M&A, here is what, unfortunately, shareholders can often expect:
The board can play a valuable role in connection with proposed acquisitions. Ego, animal spirits, and badly structured compensation systems all conspire to encourage CEOs to love acquisitions even when shareholders should hate them. Vastly more money is wasted on bad acquisitions than on overpaid CEOs.For a board to be effective here, however, it has to have its own sense of the value of things — the value of their company and the target. While a good investment banker will seek to privately discourage management from a bad transaction or from paying too much, the board is unlikely ever to get a sense of this. If the transaction is being presented to the board, any good management will have found an investment banker to endorse it. There is really no substitute for the board making its own judgments about value, and that is something that many boards are ill-equipped and ill-prepared to do.
With M&A signings already so robust, and with all that cash sloshing around on balance sheets, shareholders can be forgiven for looking ahead trepidatiously at a banner year of "uh oh" moments in dubious dealmaking.
