Cash Cow: Of the 50 Largest US Companies, Who has the Cash? Who has the Debt?

From Mish's blog:

Here's the question of the day: How much actual cash is on hand at corporations?

Fed by glowing reports from sell-side analysts, most investors are unaware that except for a handful of companies, there is no cash, only debt. Even counting short-term investments there is surprisingly little cash on hand.

Courtesy of Mike Klaczynski at Tableau Software please consider the latest update to my periodic "Cash Cow" interactive report.

The data for this sheet is from Yahoo!Finance. Scroll over any of the bars (not the company name) to see more details.

Cash is a liability not an asset for banks, so I left off financial corporations in the default map. Certainly the $277 billion in cash on hand at Bank of America is not a sign of genuine strength or profitability.

As you can see, actual cash on hand at non-financial corporations is a net negative $850 billion.

Five Cash Cows With Genuine Cash

1. Apple (AAPL) $16.15 Billion
2. Chevron (CVX) $8.03 Billion
3. Google (GOOG) $7.57 Billion
4. Qualcomm (QCOM) $4.26 Billion
5. Amazon (AMZN) $3.70 Billion

The grand total of actual available cash (at the five companies that have any) is $39.71 billion.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.kr/2013/04/cash-cow-of-50-largest-us-companies-who.html