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Economy

World Awash In Cash With Nowhere To Go

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

There is plenty of cash available to be invested in the markets and financial institutions. It is simply too frightened to come out and play.

According to Reuters "A steady move into cash is also seen in Merrill Lynch’s monthly poll of fund managers. Some 51 percent were overweight in cash in March, compared with 48 percent in February and 43 percent in January."

One by-product of that is money flowing into 10-year Treasuries should push rates down there, making them less attractive. But, there is so much fear about the future of large financial companies and equities that the capital is unlikely to move from government paper back into the markets.

It could, however, go into commodities like oil and grains. That way it can drive prices up further, fuel inflation, and make the ultimate value of the cash reserves fall.

Why not?

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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