The record amount of cash on public company balance sheets currently earns nada, nothing in terms of interest income.
Chris Petersen, president of Iowa's farmers' union, says that years of strong earnings have given them reasonably strong balance-sheets, with only half the amount of leverage they carried into the last downturn.
Until America and Europe own up to the true magnitude of the problem and sort bad debt from good to get toxic liabilities off financial-industry balance sheets, no amount of talking or stimulus will mend the global downturn, he warns.
The amount of leverage throughout the economy has magnified the loss of wealth on balances sheets, making this event far bigger than anything we have experienced in the past.
Given zero interest rates and the huge amount of newly created money, companies have added huge amounts of cash to their balance sheets.
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Before then, in the boom years, central banks operated with much smaller balance sheets, supplying a modest amount of marginal lending to smooth out the bumps in markets.
We think many traditional euro area banks see the LTRO as a repo and partial covered bond replacement, but with limited scope for loan growth, with the backdrop of deleveraging the amount used for increasing balance sheets likely to be limited.
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For those wondering the amount of work that goes into a G-20 Summit, perusing the fact sheets below will give some idea of how much gets packed into these short events when leaders around the world come together.
They work by using two polarized sheets that let only a certain amount of a device's backlight pass through.
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This would reduce the value of the huge amount of bonds held by banks, further damaging their balance sheets.
The 11.6-inch screen isn't a full HD panel, but at such a small size that amount of pixel density can start to wreak havoc on productivity anyway (Excel sheets are at 360ppi can put quite a strain on the eyes).
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And Mr Kahneman cites studies that show how overoptimistic chief executives (as measured by the amount of stock they own) were more likely to gear up their balance-sheets and pay too much for acquisitions.
He took an inordinate amount of time to come up with his complex plan to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets.
Instead, policymakers continue to replace old debt with new debt, shift it from the private to the public sector, and increase the amount of base money in the system to fill the gaps in both bank and government balance sheets.
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