During the first quarter of this year, Chicago-based consultancy Treasury Strategies questioned 135 large US corporations about their cash and near-cash holdings. It has been an article of faith that most of these investment-grade corporations remain cash-rich – having retained a large portion of their healthy earnings for the past five years, reduced large-scale capital expenditure since the dotcom bust, seen off shareholder demands to return cash and avoided the clutches of avaricious private-equity acquirers.
That cash gives them a substantial buffer against the gathering credit crunch as banks cut new lending in response to asset write-downs, increased...
