Submitted by Tyler Durden
on 08/16/2010 12:50 -0500
As Zero Hedge awaits patiently the conclusion of CapIQ's compilation of all Q2 earnings data before we complete our extended corporate cash model (we are confident this will be finalized within a week or two), we wanted to demonstrate one chart, via Nomura, that shows, as simplistically as possible, that even as corporate cash is at all time highs, corporate debt is just below all time records (and the recent decline in gross debt has only occurred courtesy of banks pushing up stock prices to artificially high levels, which has afforded many with equity refis opportunities to pay down existing debt, as well as asset dispositions). In other words, and this goes to shut up all those "cash on the sidelines" chatterboxes, net debt has barely declined from all time records. In a nutshell: total debt of over $7 trillion versus total cash of $2.6 trillion is still close to the highest net debt gearing in history. This simply means that firms are increasingly reducing their reliance on traditionally "safe" (but certainly not any longer now that the Fed is actively involved in centralized planning) ultrashort term credit funding markets such as ABCP and other evaporating shadow banking sources of liquidity, and are eliminating counterparty risk as they keep the required operating cash on their own books. Thus the cash on the sidelines is anything but: in practice what is happening is corporations are now their own banks and providers of their own near-zero maturity liquidity! All those who hope that this $2.6 trillion in cash will make it into the wider economy, absent a massive concurrent deleveraging (which won't happen absent stocks moving a new step higher) are in for a rude awakening.
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