WSJ's "Corporate-Cash Umbrellas: Too Big for This Storm?" writes "The nonfinancial firms in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index have a total of $811 billion in cash and marketable securities on their books, calculates Goldman Sachs. That's just shy of a record high in nominal terms and up $43 billion from the depths of the financial crisis last fall." The article continues, "Cash is not trash, of course; the natural urge to set a little money aside for a rainy day feels urgent in a recession. And some companies would take a big tax hit if they brought home the cash earned by overseas operations. But according to Strategas Research Partners, 168 out of the 419 nonfinancial firms in the S&P 500 have at least $1 billion in cash apiece, and 16 have more than $10 billion each. Exxon Mobil has $32 billion in cash, Cisco Systems has $29.5 billion, Apple $25.6 billion and Johnson & Johnson $12.8 billion. Such multibillion-dollar balances are more than a rainy-day fund; they're a 100-year-flood fund."
