3M Company (MMM)

I am surprised -- Market seems to be saying news from Judge Casey is just good enough to offset the wild claims of the Plaintiff's expert on Bloomberg today.

No surprise plaintiff lawyers want the company bankrupted - although threatening it right now to me almost hurts them IMO. Not sure the government or public really wants 90,000 job losses and a US diversified science-based company to just disappear over this complex issue around whose fault it was that the product didn't work, government or 3M.

This is now all negotiation about the amount.

My prediction is It will probably be in the 2 or 3B range, roughly 3X the value of Aearo.

With a number like that, Both sides will be able to claim victory.

I still think the political winds might make this a lot worse for 3M.

But they can come up with talking points like its way higher than what was proposed, and bankruptcy gets some money into the victim's hands fast and without wasting a bunch on lawyers and costing 90 thousand good jobs and an innovative US science based company.

Does anyone have any comments on the probability of Veterans lawyers being able to keep the hearing issue OUT of bankruptcy court?

Another article in WSJ today, and OF COURSE the plaintiffs don't want the subsidiary bankrupted.

But will it work?

In reply to the recent suggestion that the judge presiding over the hearing loss claim cases will try to force the entire MMM company into bankruptcy, here are some relevant facts to consider.

Institutional ownership in MMM is 67% of the total shares outstanding and Vanguard is the largest institutional owner with 47,299,775 shares as of March 30, 2022, which represents 8.32% of the TSO and has a current value of $6,775,220,030. Does anyone really believe that a prestigious institutional investor like Vanguard would continue to hold a $6.8 BILLION stake in this company if there was any significant risk of the entire company being forced into bankruptcy? These large institutional investors have inhouse legal departments who go through the quarterly and annual reports of the companies they invest in with a fine-toothed comb to assess risk, and that would undoubtedly be the case for companies in which they hold multi-billion-dollar stakes.

While the court may in fact require the company to significantly increase the $1 BB fund they have proposed setting aside to pay for the hearing loss claims, forcing the entire company into bankruptcy because one of their smaller acquired LLC businesses presumedly made a defective product makes absolutely no sense. If there was any significant chance of that happening, we would see the top institutional investors start to dump their shares, and we're not seeing that. It will be interesting to see the updated institutional ownership when the Q2 numbers are updated.

Also, any extreme and unreasonable judgements handed down by a judge or a panel of judges will be appealed and MMM has the deep pockets to tie this thing up in the courts for the next 2-3 years or longer.

What percentage of Americans realize that is creasing government spending and impeding production cause inflation?

That number sure must be small since the US Congress and President just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which spends hundreds of billions and which includes numerous things that make production more difficult.

Did you know that each Federal government worker costs about $10,000,000 in today’s money?

Let’s see 87,000 new IRS agents times 10M = $870B. Of course that price will climb.

Looks to me like all these new federal employees are being hired not to improve the federal government balance sheet but rather to just harass US workers and businesses. I can’t imagine that they’d find a trillion in mistakes on the non-govt side of the ledger. Pretty simple math don’t cha think?