American City Business Journals:
Six-hundred billion of the $1.24 trillion held by U.S. businesses is in overseas accounts, a matter of debate in Washington over offering tax breaks to encourage repatriation of the money.
Moody’s said the cash stash grew even though the amount spent on capital improvements, mergers and acquisitions and dividends increased.
Moody’s also said that the U.S. corporate debt-to-cash ratio was the lowest in the last five years at 3.06.
Since Tocqueville, foreign observers have often helped the United States to see itself in a new light, and the British thinktank ResPublica seems to be continuing in that tradition as it prepares to set up an American branch. During a recent visit to FrumForum, ResPublica founder Phillip Blond shared a presentation which included a startling fact: despite American politicians’ pro-small business rhetoric, the U.S. lags far behind most other developed countries in the share of citizens employed by small businesses.