charitable contributions, minimum advertising, no new products, no new ventures, and fire everybody whose presence is not required to get today's minimum job done. Even this won't be enough. You'll need to close plants, renegotiate the union contracts, sell off parts of the company to get the cash to service the debt. With no recession you may squeak by. But it's not a happy prospect! If you have selected the target discreetly and priced your tender offer properly, your salvation can be close at hand. Even if the target can't or won't pay "greenmail," it is still faced with frustrating you by creating a market for its shares at a price higher than you have offered - no easy task when your hostile tender was made at a price that the security analysts probably considered ridiculous a few weeks earlier. For some targets there may be a "do-it-yourself" solution. It may respond like a dog eating its own tail by buying back part of its own stock and retiring it. It may borrow the money to do so or use surplus cash that it had on hand and didn't know how to invest to advantage. In modern jargon this is a form of "downsizing" since company capital is reduced. It may also have to resort to additional "downsizing" by selling assets so that it can ultimately to pay off the debt. Hopefully with fewer shares outstanding the earnings per share will increase and the price of the stock will go up and stay up at least long enough for you to unload your shares at the higher price. As a raider you also can anticipate being rescued by offers from others who are willing to pay more than you for the target's 9.