Corporate Cash Levels Are Starting to Fall: Credit Weekly

The latest earnings period brought what might be an early warning sign about credit quality for high-grade US companies.

Cash levels at blue-chip companies are shrinking, when excluding results from the most-cash-rich corporations. Among members of the S&P 500 that have posted results, cash levels for the latest quarter fell nearly 1% compared with the last three months of 2024. That’s according to a Bloomberg News analysis that focuses on non-financial companies with less than $30 billion of cash.

The group’s cash holdings, now at $1.14 trillion, have broadly been declining since the third quarter of 2023, when they ...