Originally Posted by
Humboldt
From the town hall, I noticed that they are taking the grants but looking into other options for loans. My father sent me an email from his financial advisor with many bullets of positive news during this time. Bullet # 2 was the fact that corporate CEOs in the US are currently buying their own stock shares at levels not seen since 2009. This indicates that CEOs are confident that their companies will rebound. Dell Technologies CEO Micheal Dell just bought bought $26.3 million of his own stock last week.
That would be one good reason not to take the government loans and perhaps why leadership is looking at other revenue streams to avoid the government loans.
Interesting perspective. Did he (or the article he mentioned) say anything about DL or other airline execs doing so at this time?
As for other revenue, great, although I'm not seeing a lot right now except for cargo, which also requires at least some domestic flying footprint beyond the initial delivery hub.
I'm just as concerned with our ability to participate in the recovery later. If all we do is shrink to profitability, we'll be absolutely creamed by the existing and future start up LCCs and be lucky to beat back cabotage attempts. Thats one reason why IMO we need a strategy to ramp up quickly and why furloughing to the bones of the optimizer will absolutely screw us later, far negating any savings in the medium term. That doesn't mean its a binary choice (internet porn version of 7K furloughs versus zero) but if we do it has to be significantly less than current or immediately forcast demand or we'll be hosed on the other side of this. Yet another reason why "work less not for less" should be the battle plan when the time comes.