Cash Balances Support These Dividend Stocks

Earlier this week, Moody’s (NYSE:MCO) Investors Service announced that U.S. corporations are sitting on a $1.24 trillion cash hoard. Due to record low interest rates, corporations have been able to sock away more cash while issuing record amounts of bonds in the last couple of years. As a result, Moody’s said it expects companies to use the cash for shareholder dividends, buyback programs and acquisition activity. In other cases, companies will maintain high levels of cash in order to insulate themselves from another credit crisis.

The top five cash kings on Wall Street are Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO), Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE). Moody’s estimates that these five companies alone hold about $276 billion of cash, representing more than 20 percent of the total non-financial corporate cash balances. This is an increase from $207 billion a year earlier.

Source: Wall Street Cheat Sheet

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