Classical economic theory suggests that consumers and businesses, responding to market signals such as prices and interest rates, collectively spend, save or invest their money in the most efficient manner. But the growing trove of cash on corporate balance sheets, measuring roughly $2 trillion for the S&P 500 companies, suggests otherwise.
Not only are the funds being deployed extremely inefficiently, but the mountain of cash is in itself a troubling indication that something has gone badly wrong in the economic system. If productive, ongoing concerns operating in highly competitive markets don't have any useful way to deploy the cash equivalent of 15% of U.S. GDP in their businesses, and are putting it instead into money markets and Treasury bonds giving them a negative return in inflation-adjusted terms, it means the economy is not functioning efficiently.
Moreover, if, as some analysts suggest, holding such huge cash reserves has become necessary for companies to protect themselves in a fragile financial environment or to survive the next catastrophic crash, then the economy has become unbalanced and dangerously volatile.
Worrisome Sign
By historical standards, companies now are remarkably cash-rich. Some industries stand out as particularly determined to hoard cash, such as pharmaceuticals, high-tech and telecoms, but blue-chip balance sheets have become cash-heavy across the board. Many big companies now hold more than enough cash to pay off their debts. Microsoft's cash holdings are more than four times higher than the size of its debt, while Google and Intel have enough cash to repay all their debt 10 times over.
This tendency goes beyond what should be considered prudent, especially at a time when companies continue to generate plenty of cash on an ongoing basis. Managing such hoards of cash is expensive. It requires building and maintaining a considerable cash management infrastructure, consisting of human resources and technology. But that's only part of the problem. Corporate cash has to be invested prudently because investors will penalize companies for taking risks with their cash. This means that returns on investing cash are going to be meager in the best of times, well below profit margins achieved by those companies in their core business. But recently times have not been kind to savers.
An article at the online publication 24/7 Wall Street looked at how typical blue chips have built up their short-term holdings. The 10 companies highlighted had $288 billion in cash, cash equivalent and short-term securities, with Google holding $45 billion, Cisco $47 billion and Microsoft over $50 billion. Short-term rates have been at zero for the past five years, so that all that cash is earning virtually nothing and return on investment is substantially below the companies' cost of capital.
Moreover, even long-term interest rates have been well below inflation. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond has been hovering around 2%, compared to a CPI rate of nearly 3% in the early months of 2012. In other words, even long-term securities are losing money in real terms, and any further uptick in inflation could accelerate real losses for U.S. corporates. There could be additional losses if bond prices fall from their current historically high levels.
Lost Value
Holding so much cash, then, actually destroys value for shareholders. Even Apple, while making huge returns for investors over the past decade and a half, subtracted some of that value as long as it sat on close to $100 billion in cash, before it made the decision to return about half of its cash to shareholders by announcing that it would resume dividends for the first time since 1995.
