A Third Of Cash Is Held By 5 US Tech Companies (siliconbeat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Moody's Investors Service released an analysis Friday that shows Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Cisco Systems, and Oracle are sitting on $504 billion, which is roughly 30% of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by U.S. non-financial companies in 2015. Almost all of their earnings ($1.2 trillion) are stashed overseas in an effort to avoid paying taxes on moving profits back to the U.S. under the country's complex tax code. Apple has more than 90 percent of its money located outside of the U.S., according to its most recent filings. Moody's said in its report that "we expect that overseas cash balances will continue to grow unless tax laws are changed to encourage companies to repatriate money." Some of the other tech and Silicon Valley companies in the top 50 include Intel, Gilead Sciences, Facebook, Amazon, Qualcomm, eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo.

Comments

And trump wants to legalize tax evasion

[NotInHere]

Trump wants to legalize companies to bring in that money into the USA without having to pay taxes. Basically a big present he'll give them.

Re:And trump wants to legalize tax evasion

[Anonymous Coward]

vs. the alternative, to continue letting them keep it out of the USA while occasionally moaning during a press conference about how unfair it all is. That's the Obama doctrine Hillary has vowed to uphold.

Do we need more corporate power?

[dbreeze]

I hope enough of us flesh and bone humans realize soon enough that corporations just aren't like us. Their interests and motivations are not ours. Either they will rule or we will rule. We had better get to work before it's too late.... http://www.movetoamend.org/

Lies

[don_combatant]

This story is misleading and irresponsible. There are many different measures of the US money supply including M0, M1, M2, M3, M4, adjusted monetary base, et al. The $1.7T number represents only the physically printed bills plus minted coins in circulation. M4 represents the total money supply including physical cash, bank balances, certificates of deposit, etc. Current US M3 money supply is approaching $20T, and the Treasury Department doesn't even divulge the M4 numbers anymore as per Federal Reserve Directive because they claim it's too difficult to calculate the total amount of US currency in circulation. READ: they don't want the proles knowing how much money is being pumped into the system post 2008 crash. The Fed alone has nearly $4T on their balance sheet and they don't even have legal authority to print money -- that's the Treasury Departments arena.

This story would only be accurate if those companies were holding the $500 billion in actual physical $100 bills in a vault. They are not. This $500 billion is merely entries in a database on a bank server and thus should be compared to the total M4 money supply, not M0. While $500B is a tremendous amount of money, the story would be much less shocking if the correct comparison was made.

"moving back"?

[superwiz]

That money was never taken out of the country, so why is it "moving it back"? If Apple sells an iPhone in Japan and it manufactured the phone in China, why should it deposit the profits on that money in a US bank?

Re:"moving back"?

[phizi0n]

Even if it is manufactured and sold outside the country, lots of work inside the US helped to produce it (designing it, programing it, testing it) so shouldn't some portion of the profits still come back?

The bigger issue is that their offshore money is not only from offshore business but it does get "exported" as well. They set up a bunch of shell corporations and then one of their shell companies pays another for whatever reason they make up in order to move money from one country to another. For instance, Google US could take all their profits and pay it to Google Ireland for [insert any reason] and then Google US's taxable income would be $0 so they'd pay no taxes in the US. This is how literally every multinational corporation avoids paying taxes or at least significantly reducing them.

Corporations use taxpayer funded services

[MrKaos]

Revoke their charter if they are not prepared to contribute to the societies that grant them a license to exist. After all they are users of infrastructure and they expect the community to absorb all manner of negative externalities. It's only right that they contribute their share of tax if the rest of us do.