[shingen]

That headline meme sounds impressive: corporations hoarding cash.

Until you dig deeper and find out that US corporations are accumulating debt at the fastest pace in world history. Their cash is required to continue to offset the massive debt being acquired. If interest rates go up at all in the next ten years, bankruptcies will skyrocket. A lot of companies are being irresponsible with debt right now because they can issue it at hyper low rates.

[vannevar]

Is there a good source for historical data on this? The best I could find goes back to 1996, and while the amounts issued in 2006-2010 are high, they don't show the steep hockey-stick climb that we saw in the mortgage crisis, for instance.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ksi3L1y...