All across the world companies have in recent years been hoarding cash, nowhere more so than in the US. For at least a decade and a half, cash has progressively increased its share of the American corporate balance sheet, to the point where US quoted companies have turned into the Scrooges of the global economy. According to research by Juan Sánchez and Emircan Yurdagul of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, their cash hoard had reached almost $5tn by the end of 2011.
近年来，世界各地的企业都在囤积现金，其中尤以美国企业为甚。至少从15年前起，美国企业资产负债表上的现金比例就开始逐渐上升，以至于美国上市公司成了全球经济中的守财奴。根据美国圣路易斯联邦储备银行(Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis)的胡安•桑切斯(Juan Sánchez)和米尔詹•尤尔达居尔(Emircan Yurdagul)的调查研究，到2011年底为止，这些公司囤积了将近5万亿美元的现金。
Such is the scale of this cash pile that the US corporate sector must have been partly responsible for the surge in demand for safe assets and the decline in interest rates that fuelled the US housing bubble. Yet American business has been spared the opprobrium heaped on excess savers such as China, whose official reserves top $3.5tn. There is nonetheless something fundamentally different about the US corporate cash pile compared with those of, say, China and Japan, where burgeoning corporate sector savings have increasingly fuelled global imbalances.
如此大规模的现金储备，令美国公司对安全资产需求增加和利率下降难辞其咎，而这两点都刺激了美国的房地产泡沫。但美国企业没有遭受中国等储蓄过度国家受到的指责（中国官方储备达3.5万亿美元）。不过，与中国和日本这些国家相比（中日迅速增长的企业储蓄令全球失衡不断加剧），美国公司的现金储备存在着根本上的不同。
Corporate savings consist of depreciation and retained earnings. For much of the past 20 years the Chinese government has urged state-owned companies not to distribute profits, which would help push up retentions. In the absence of developed financial markets, companies are more reliant, too, on internal financing. For its part, Japan is a mature economy in which investment opportunities are insufficient to absorb the country’s domestic savings.
企业储蓄由折旧和留存收益构成。过去20年里，中国政府多数时间都在鼓励国有企业不分配利润，这样有助于增加留存收益。由于缺乏发达的金融市场，企业也更依赖内部融资。而日本已是成熟经济体，其投资机会不足以吸收国内储蓄。