Comments on: The ever-falling BP share price

By: mourndekai

mourndekai — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:07:17 +0000

It took 17 years for Exxon to be finally penalised for Valdez. I would consider this the lower estimate for BP.

Why? Well BP has more avenues to fight this than Exxon mainly because the American contractors it got in to do the drilling and well prep were the ones who seemed to have slipped up.

The clean up will actually happend far quicker than people expect

By: MiltonRecht

MiltonRecht — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 05:48:31 +0000

Actually, the market has not considered BP’s dividend safe for over a year. BP’s dividend yield 12-18 months ago was in the range of 8-10 percent.

If one used the put-call parity formula for BP stock and option prices with a correction for expected dividends with stock and option prices from that time, the results showed that the market was expecting a dividend cut.

Since BP had more than enough earnings and cashflow to pay dividends at that time, the market was predicting some extraordinary event that would cause BP to reduce its dividend at least as far back as 18 months ago.

By: dWj

dWj — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 23:09:14 +0000

Er, I put that comment on the wrong post…

By: dWj

dWj — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 23:07:55 +0000

LUV pays a dividend of 0.5 cents per share per quarter; my understanding (though this may be wrong) is that this is so that institutional shareholders with mandates to hold only dividend-paying stocks can own their stock. I think suspension is likely, and that any dividend would face political headwind, but I’d like to raise the possibility that BP will cut the dividend to some token amount, but not to zero. I don’t think that’s the most likely scenario, though.

By: jimko

jimko — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:22:56 +0000

the deleting of dividends from BP is a deletion from every low income person in the usa–every retirement trust has stocks like BP BECAUSE they pay cash and have been a good earner–where bonds and C-D’s pay almost nothing–great –the punishment lands not on the aristocrat super rich greedheads–but on janitors-carpenters-plumbers-service workers—-great idea–the focus should be on just stoping the spill not thinking how much you’re going to make off this disaster–I am a low income senior with heart and kidney problems for whom the medicare cut (21%) are going to pinch–me and hundreds of thousands of others who face death from further cuts in our paltry income–when these hi-income harvard lawyers say “LETS GET THE BASTARDS”–they’re talking about YOU dummy!!

By: csodak

csodak — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:00:07 +0000

Enough already about how oil is in everything we consume including food. The evidence is clear, whether it is in the pure form that spills into the environment or through the goods that we consume and then throw away or the food that we eat, oil poisons the earth and the human body and it is a indisputable fact!

So what do we do…continue to poison the environment and ourselves or do we move our countries efforts in decisively moving away from oil by aggressively developing other sources of energy that are more inert to biological systems?

Do we continue to cry like babies when we invest in companies who cut corners and damage the public or environment because we are afraid of how the corporations might respond or how the stock drop might hurt investors?

Is there any wonder why we are in a bear market.

By: DanHess

DanHess — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:39:56 +0000

jopocop is right. This is a process that needs time.

It’s seems to me to be pretty hypocritical to hate on big oil when oil is crucial in almost every aspect of our lives. It provides the food in our bellies, it is involved in most of the products that we buy and it gets us around on land and in the air.

Does anyone else find it silly when Obama jets around with his massive entourage, talking about kicking oil-related ass?

Has the Federal government bothered to find and market even one drop of oil?

The number of solutions offered by the Federal government through this fiasco has been and will remain exactly zero. It is much safer not to offer any solutions, because if they don’t work, no skin off your back!

By: DougJ

DougJ — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:34:02 +0000

The leak is far worse than BP or the US government are admitting. No corporation is big enough to ever pay for a full cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico. BP will be bankrupted in short order, its assets sold off.

By: Pug

Pug — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:36:04 +0000

Obama showed what he thought of pensioners and the common working man when he forced GM into bankruptcy and handed the company over to his labor union backers. While Obama has caused immeasurable suffering in the US since taking office, all we’ve heard from the media is how beloved he is in Europe. Though I hate to see retirees lose what they worked their entire lives for, perhaps this will wake Europe out its stupor for this incompetent dope.

By: DanHess

DanHess — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:18:16 +0000

“BP stock would surely be worth a lot more than it is right now. But, thankfully, it’s not.”

Woah there, Felix! Are you rooting for BP to fail?

By: RogerUSA

RogerUSA — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:15:54 +0000

Hello Obama?

This is David Cameron. David.. You know the PM of Britain.
PRIME MINISTER. YAH. How are you doing? Listen on that BP dividend thing. Listen, and listen carefully. You have your problems and I have mine. Now there are a lot of people depending on their dividens to pay the rent, food, electric bill, you know. And in your country, you have hundreds of pension funds that are counting on that dividend payment to meet their obligation. Now if you cut that dividend. The stock is going to plummet. BP might even go bankrupt. That’s gonna really piss me off. Got that? Now, you know we have troops in Afghanistan right? Well, let me tell you how it’s gonna be old chum!

By: jopocop

jopocop — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:45:05 +0000

Why is it that doomsday stories float around all the time, whether it is the stock price or
anything connected to the spill.
Everybody needs to relax and figure this whole process is just going to take time. There will be continuing efforts to collect more oil, and to clean it up. A lot of the oil is degrading by nature anyway.
Come August, it will be plugged and much of this sad story will fall to the way side.
It is just too bad that if only that BOP worked, as it was suppose too, all of this horrible outcome could have been avoided.
The BOP would have stopped the blow out in the first place, and also, closed off the well later on if that portion did not work as designed for some reason.
Yeah, there was drilling mistakes up top, but, as I see it, it was the BOP that is the main culprit here—it should have prevented all of this.

By: Potatoe1

Potatoe1 — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:01:21 +0000

Remember the Valdez accident, Exxon paid pennies on the dollar after years of legal battles. If BP did not keep making mistakes they could start that process. Not making a clean cut on the riser is just the latest of their blunders and now making noises about not compensating laid off workers will put the pressure on many people to actually make them pay. I pity the Brits who own their stock.

By: ErnieD

ErnieD — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:48:58 +0000

I suspect that an end game may include BP selling its US offshore oil exploration and production operations to other majors so that the government can allow drilling to recommence.

By: Setty

Setty — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:40:43 +0000

PS – I have no BP shares. Just a lot of doubt about Obama’s desire or capacity to stick it to the man.