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Investing

Corporate Cash Piles Up

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The debate over how America’s largest companies use cash will pick up again. Moody’s Investor Services released a study that forecasts how big the cash balances will be at some of these public corporations at the end of 2013.

The kind of activism Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) has faced about distributing its cash to shareholders through a higher dividend or share buybacks almost certainly will spread to the other companies on the Moody’s list.

The Moody’s report put Apple’s year-end cash balance at $170 billion. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) are also on the Moody’s list. Perhaps the most critical difference between these companies and Apple is that they have shown a history of acquisitions. Apple has never used its money that way, at least on any large scale.

According to MarketWatch:

Overall, corporate-cash stockpiles at U.S. non-financial companies rated by Moody’s grew to $1.45 trillion in 2012, up 10% from 2011, according to the report.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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