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No shortage of oil at the moment after a period of massive investment by the global oil industry.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-does-wall-street-love-234600910.html

And Prof.Plum. What country would sign up to a system were it couldn't print its own currency? Only a stupid country would do that. Hence don't expect that country to survive in that state forever. Either more intelligent people will form a future government and restore the countries right to print money. Or the economy will become such an economic basket case that I wouldn't be surprised if it fractured into complete chaos and didn't serve the economic needs of anyone, nor its own citizens.

No shortage of oil at the moment after a period of massive investment by the global oil industry.

Hence there should be money available for new mining projects, logically speaking.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-does-wall-street-love-234600910.html

No shortage of oil at the moment after a period of massive investment by the global oil industry.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-does-wall-street-love-234600910.html

No shortage of oil at the moment after a period of massive investment by the global oil industry.

Hence there should be money available for new mining projects, logically speaking.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-does-wall-street-love-234600910.html

The trouble for me is that some companies are net cash positive and have plans to increase their positive cashflows even further. Once you are net cash positive (in terms of cash balances compared to short and long-term loans/financial instruments) you are out of the clutches of the banks, bondholders or any other debt providers.

I've been thinking to myself that people talking about paying off 20% of the debt in two years time is not really going to appeal to people looking to invest money as companies which already have zero net debt and are talking about every future improvement to the business translating to boosting the magnitude of their positive cash flows.

Just sayin' if you get too close to something you can't see the wood for the trees. But investing in a company beholden to banks and other sources of debt doesn't really seem as attractive to me any longer as looking for companies with zero debt and many years of steadily increasing positive cash flows.

And the title in full to this post is, Are Companies with Debts Attractive to Equity Investors?

There's still a lot of money around ... go to a small UK market town and see all of the farm vehicles, diggers, and vans/lorries on the business parks around the outskirts. Also everyone who lives a few miles away seem to have large RangeRovers, a sports car, a luxury car, and a landrover. Also plenty of garages still about in such market towns and streets still full of plenty of cars (not an electric vehicle in sight).

Hence whatever shareholders have lost I would say it has not disappeared from the economy but that money has found it's way to more traditional Conservative interests...the large landowners, gentlemen farmers, out-of-town family businesses and the such like.

Maybe shareholders have lost control and and instead of businesses working for banks that banks are now working for businesses...which in effect means bad businesses can keep getting bailed out on cheap loans, increased loans, until all of the shareholder capital disappears and only if the share prices fell below 50p do I believe that anybody in the HoC, or the SFO, or FSA, would take an interest at what wasteful projects and dubious schemes that shareholders' capital had been frittered away on supporting.

If you can't beat 'em then join 'em.

I must say that apart from correlation models (which can be useful in the right circumstances) the important things to consider are:

(1) Cause and effect - if people see X being treated differently they will demand the same or change their behaviour - therefore you can't assume that tweaking something in sector p will have have a far larger effect some time later in sector c.

(2) Psychological/sociological models. Most people seem to have a natural attraction to fulfilling a social role (taught to them by their parents or through education). Hence these people will not behave rationally in a classical economic sense . because they will be far more price insensitive than expected by classical economics (and continue to perform their social role despite huge financial incentives to do otherwise)

(3) Facebook/The internet/Peer-to-peer or business-to-business transactions. This has completely revolutionised the way people conduct their lives. Many parts of society have been slower (or faster) to adopt this technological revolution. However the early adopters have been able to trade with each other (cutting out middlemen and building up more efficient economic networks which they can trust - unlike the bankers which you never used to be able to trust). People are building up trust based on social knowledge and rating each other - as well as conducting business in smaller but more frequent quantities so that any single loss from a breach of trust is no longer so damaging to themselves).

There is no way that the people who used to model the economy had a clue about even a fraction of the impact of the above - you would need to have studied statistics, philosophy, science, psychology, sociology, business, and technology all to PhD level - how many employees of Lloyds/RBS back in 2006 had PhDs in all of the above, and what's more were able to combine all of that knowledge into a single model of the economy able to produce an output for each of the bank's investments based on the criterion's to be inputted??

Who are them and us?

That is such a shallow view of the world in my opinion.

I am one of them. I have some amount of power but not as much as some others. We are open to changing our minds. And what is Democracy? It exists in different forms, all of them imperfect.

People span a wide range, and all power structures or social orders (hierarchies or whatever your preferred term) eventually crumble and need to be remade with the cards adjusted - some up, some down.

Change is the only constant and why not embrace it if you can leave your simplistic world of them and us behind. We are all one my friend!

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/shell-starts-exploratory-drilling-oil-093056777.html

How come a well that is only 1,300 metres deep would take about 16 days in the North Sea and yet it is going to take 90 days in the Black Sea. And please don't say the water depth can be a factor as large companies like Shell as very familiar with drilling wells in up to 10,000 feet of water (although to be fair the Black Sea does have a maximum depth of nearly 7,000 feet which is pretty deep - although nothing modern rigs can't easily handle).

So why is the drilling going to be so slow in the Black sea? And also why is the drilling of Zama so slow offshore Mexico. I am reading many reports of the speed with which shale companies drill and often they are drilling 8,000-9,000 feet in as little as 9 days!! No wonder their production keeps increasing every year and their share prices keep rising whilst those of UK-listed oil and gas companies only ever seem to sink. They are drilling so much faster in America than happens in the North Sea or even offshore Mexico (judging by the horrendously slow Zama appraisal process). So what is it that is enabling share companies to drill 25 wells per year with a single rig - is there a logical answer or have the shale companies just paid more money to the people who programme the algorithms which un the financial markets - hence they can make you the Daddy if you pay them enough - because who actually programmes the financial algorithms anyway - these people are potentially more powerful than Central Banks because of they have programmed the algorithms they then know of the financial future independently of news and other crap which doesn't seem to affect the share prices from making their merry paths no matter how crazy the dividends, debts or fundamentals become - all of this seems irrelevant to modern markets somehow??

Or does someone else have an alternative explanation of why better capitalised companies sometimes aren't allowed to roll-over loans and go bankrupt whilst objectively less well capitalised companies (within the same sector) seem to have different (more lenient) rules applied to them by their bankers when it comes to refinancing.

I'm afraid I can say with hand on heart, and based on my own surveys, that the economy is nowhere near at full employment.

I am afraid that the people in the ONS have deceived the government ...(probably because the government doesn't want to hear the truth that the economy has about 20% unemployment, and a further 30% of under-utilised (part-time) workers).

Of course the unemployment is disguised by universal credit and other welfare payments - but no one can say that the economy is at anywhere close to full employment unless they live is some bubble and never get out around the country and do some proper door-to-door surveys (that is the only way to find out the real levels of economic activity).

PMO investors need to post some pics on Instagram/Twitter of starving children and then a load food being delivered by trucks, from a manufacturing plant where all the employees drove to work by car, and then the raw ingredients coming from combine harvesters/tractors.

This is the way to deal with the greens/nimbies who are enriching themselves at the expense of the people who actually provide them their food, only for them to attack/bite the investors who invest in the hands which feed them.

Stop using investor money from the oil sector to feed the greens/nimbies should be the policy of any political party who really wants to win at the next election in the UK or any other country with a significant oil and gas industry.

Also Tesco's booker deal did set a kind of precedent as Tesco paid a lot for Booker (was it £3.2 billion or £1.6 billion?)

Anyway it was not loose change in terms of deals within the grocery sector....and as such I have sympathy for those who would argue that it set a precedent that consolidation can happen within this sector if it is done in such a way as creates economic efficiencies (and personally I saw the Booker deal as raising prices for consumers whilst a Sainsbury's-Asda merger would likely lower price due to creating real economies of scale, whereas Booker was just a bolt-on addition for Tesco and could not really be used, as far as I understand, to create genuine efficiencies which would be possible from an Asda-Sainsbury's deal/

Thanks... will confirm myself obviously ….however I really can see the appeal of certain aspects of the CMA allowing some kind of consolidation in the food sector to happen in the UK....as one must admit food stores have been sprouting up like mushrooms the past 6 or 7 years (M&S food stores, Ocado, Lidl, Aldi and Co-op mainly).

Luckily snige I eat locally produced honey and fresh wild raspberries...hope you are making the most of what Britain has to offer apart from the second-rate food you get in the cities. Also the countryside is far nicer than the cities...as well as the food being better....only issue I have is the UK b/c roads are abominable due to potholes and poor surfaces....hence it is hard to get goods flowing from the far reaches of the countryside (West Wales, Cumbria, Northumberland) down to the centres of wealth in the UK (mainly the South East, Home Counties and South of Manchester/Cheshire).

Hi TheFarEnd,

Thanks for laying your cards out and indicating that you are against any new infrastructure in the UK...my own view is that the UK would be a far nicer place to travel around/work in if there was some investment into outlying roads, resurfacing roads, and new train lines and rolling stock. Also in certain sectors some of the motorways would benefit from double-decker sections like in Japan. However the main thing to create a better economy would be better road rail links from the south east across to Wales, Cumbria and up to Northumberland....then a lot more local food could be shipped down to the south east...and some of the business investment traditionally in those parts might of its own free will shift to some of the smaller towns in Wales, Cumbria and Northumberland. I think this would be a win-win for everyone as there is nothing like op-notch locally produced food products and businesses which set-up in other parts of the country will benefit from a fresh perspective on what the UK could be like if there was a vision at a national level to create more win-wins generally.

How is the vendor loan accounted for in the published accounts?

Would the vendor loan come under current borrowings in the "current liabilities" section of the accounts?

"People who don't shop around may pay more for their energy"...Well duh ...if I don't shop around for clothes, food, or tools them I am likely to pay more ….the government just wants to shaft shareholders here by applying one rule here and a different rule for every other area of the economy.

The CEO of First Utility is Colin Crooks...just sayin'.

I'd love to know if Iain Conn has any respect for shareholders in CNA or he is just a useful muppet to other people who are trying to put Centrica out of business...what has Centrica done wrong? They must have done something wrong to be this hated by investors...and if they admit their mistakes...and change course … is there any chance of attracting investors with wider political/economic influence back to the company?

"People who don't shop around may pay more for their energy"...Well duh ...if I don't shop around for clothes, food, or tools them I am likely to pay more ….the government just wants to shaft shareholders here by applying one rule here and a different rule for every other areas of the economy.

It's a complete scam ...perhaps these people are sending emails to themselves from various different email accounts to look like invoices from suppliers (which in the end turn out to be fraudulent). Then they pay the money ...it ends up where it's not meant to be (but how do we know not in an account which a friend of these people have access to) and then the original person claims the money back from the back (saying they had been conned into paying an invoice to an incorrect account). Hence these people would have ended up both with their own money back as well a compensation payment from the bank for a fraud which they themselves committed.

Complete joke ...far too easy to scam UK banks ….shareholders money literally being given away to crooks as the banks do zero to educate citizens that this type of fraud couldn't happen as they have systems in place to stop it...rather the opposite seems to be true ...they seem to want to assure customers that you will be compensated for any losses that occur as long as you haven't done something silly like written your PIN down on a piece of paper in you wallet. However this gives investors zero confidence that there aren't large numbers of businesses/people creating fraudulent invoices/emails...transferring the money to an account which their friends have access to...and then claiming that same money back from the bank in question.

What a joke...and why is the government always on the side of fraudsters rather than shareholders?

The thing about leaving is that it would be expected to do one thing which would boost the UK economy … that is to cause a temporary devaluation of Sterling.

On the other hand I think the Brexiteers need to fulfil their promises if they are to be taken seriously any longer....hence they need to reaffirm that as soon as we leave there will be an extra £350 million per week paid to the NHS on top of the current existing NHS budget and purely as an additional amount. They also need to keep to all their other promises which they made on national media in order to win the vote.

Promises need to be kept … otherwise their will be zero ability to vote based upon different visions for the UK in the future = chaos and the end of a functioning democracy in the UK....I try not to be melodramatic but if you can't trust manifestos to be implemented then there is zero basis for anyone to bother voting in the future...which would mean their is zero legitimacy for the government to purse one policy direction over another … which means every local area/even every local citizen will feel they have a moral/ethical right just to organise things to suit the majority at their local level = complete loss of control by the national government = no ability to implement any future strategic economic policies at a national level.