Don't get me wrong. At an individual company level, it's obvious that if DuPont has a bunch of marketable securities on its balance sheet, it is free to sell those securities and spend the money on new equipment and so forth. The issue is that somebody else has to buy those securities. At the end of the day, there is no less "cash on the sidelines" after that change of ownership than there was before.
Put simply, there is a lot of apparent "cash on the sidelines" because the government and many corporations have issued enormous quantities of new debt, often with short maturities, while other corporations have purchased it. It is an equilibrium. The assets that are held in the right hand represent debt that is owed by the left. You cannot call that pile of short-term marketable securities an asset without calling it a liability. The cash on the sidelines is evidence of debt incurred to fund economic activity that is already in the past. It will remain "on the sidelines" until the debt is retired. The government debt has been issued to finance deficit spending. At the same time, a great deal of corporate debt has been issued over the past year apparently as a pre-emptive measure against the possibility of the capital markets freezing up again.
What's fascinating about the "corporate cash" argument is that few observers recognize that a great deal of this cash is not retained earnings but new debt issuance. Brett Arends of MarketWatch puts present levels of corporate cash in perspective: "According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial firms borrowed another $289 billion in the first quarter, taking their total domestic debts to $7.2 trillion, the highest level ever. That's up by $1.1 trillion since the first quarter of 2007; it's twice the level seen in the late 1990s. Central bank and Commerce Department data reveal that gross domestic debts of nonfinancial corporations now amount to 50% of GDP."
Andrew Smithers observes that the prevailing corporate debt burdens, " un derline the poor state of the U.S. private sector's balance sheets. While this is generally recognized for households, it is often denied with regard to corporations. These denials are without merit and depend on looking at cash assets and ignoring liabilities."
Similarly, Annaly Capital notes " in relation to their debt outstanding, corporations are less liquid than they were prior to the recession" (HT: The Pragmatic Capitalist / Business Insider)
As with job creation, new investment is not driven by the amount of cash on hand, but by anticipation of profitable activity and fear of excessive demand that exceeds capacity. There is little evidence that these considerations are powerful at the present time.
