They agreed to the $20B fund because it would stabilize their stock, which had declined from $60 to $30 per share. With over 3B shares outstanding, that was a loss of $90B already experienced, so the $5B funding required this year was a bargain, especially when the stock looked like it might going into free fall. Share prices may well have been coming in range of the Wolfpack, the adverse investors so named by the Swedish Finance Minister, for raiding companies and now countries in financial stress. These are the guys, for example, that purchased $5/share puts (contracts to sell at $5/share) when Smith-Barney was still priced in the $50s per share. The puts would have been very cheap, then the Wolfpack drove down the price using leverage. Within a few weeks, Smith-Barney was bought out for $2 per share, giving the Wolfpack $3/share profit less their put cost (say, 5-cents per share).
The Wolfpack is now working countries such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland, but won't hesitate to gobble up BP if the opportunity became available--and it almost did.
This one oil find, to be leaking so much, under so much pressure, is probably a big one (pressure at 5000 feet is about 2250 lbs/square inch). If it were even 1B barrels, at $70 per barrel, it is worth $70B, the largest speculated cost of the cleanup and compensation.
No, BP won't be run out of money too easily, and this doesn't count later, when the well is capped, much is cleaned up, and BP requests the courts cap payouts based on how far BP had already exceeded the $75M maximum liability provided by our lawmakers in their infinite wisdom. Might explain why the CONgressional twits yelled loudly at BP: a little hope-you-don't-notice how incompetent we've been.
