"A fair amount has been written, some of it by me, about the extraordinarily large volumes of cash that U.S. corporations have amassed due to a combination of weak investment and tax avoidance strategies. But as Richard Waters points out, this is hardly an across-the-board phenomenon. Instead, a handful of firms account for a huge share of the money:
By the middle of last year, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few tech winners had left just six companies – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle and Qualcomm – with more than a quarter of the $1.5tn held by US non-financial corporations, according to rating agency Moody’s.
With nearly $150bn in its coffers, Apple alone was sitting on close to 10 per cent of corporate America’s cash.
This is so much money that individual firms' decisions arguably become macroeconomically relevant. That Apple cash is about 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Of course with many earnings coming from abroad these days you expect to see some detachment between firm decision-making and the state of the American domestic economy. But as a practical matter were this money to be spent a large share of it would likely be spent in North America."
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| Indignant desert birds are indignant |
To recap, the Rough Beast of the Technium is roused from her slumber by the availability to capture rents on the intelligence explosion. When I am among millions (turning into billions) of domesticated primates with consistent and persistent networked compute means resulting in a vast number of light-weight connections... the second coming is at hand.
The next step is an ensemble of corporate Watsons tuned to optimize alone and then together to choose product portfolio behavior (i.e. strategy) with rapidly improving auto-learning. By 2020, humans will be in the loop in driverless cars and corporate results.
