I had this idea a couple weeks ago but wasn’t going to do anything with it. After the last couple days though, I thought I’d toss it out there:
Right now there are a lot of people with money that are looking for a place to put it. CD rates aren’t that great, and the banks are looking a little scary. I don’t ever remember talking to so many people that were making sure they only have $100,000 in their bank account (so they are protected by FDIC insurance). That’s not a good sign.
Here’s the idea I had in case there were problems raising the $300,000,000. What if Sirius XM did an offering that was available to their customers, investors, and anyone else that wants in on it?
There are about 19 million subscribers. What if Sirius offered a CD with a rate like 10%? It would be good for the company and good for the small investor. Maybe have two tiers. A $5,000 CD gets you 8% and two or three years of free Sirius XM service. A $10,000 CD might get 10% with a lifetime subscription to Sirius XM. Or you could do a few different tiers, but anyway you get the idea. Play with it however you want.
If we said the average CD was $7,500. You’d only need one quarter of one percent of the subscribers to participate.
$300,000,000 / 7,500=40,000 CD’s to be issued.
40,000 / 19,000,000 subscribers=.0021 or 0.21 percent.
Sirius could promote the CD on the air for free. I think it could be presented in a way that it didn’t look desperate, but that it was benefited the small investor as well. They will be able to get rates that usually only the big boys get.
It may turn out to be too big of a hassle to do all that, and I don’t know what all the regulations would be or if each investor would have to be accredited or not.
Most likely, Mel will find financing with decent terms without having to do something like this. I did think the math was interesting though, especially given what’s going on in the financial sector these days.