The amount of cash multinational corporations are stashing is at an all time high and economists are wondering why. A recent Federal Reserve research paper examined some of the reasons. A big one is multinationals pay no taxes on profits if they park them offshore. A stash of cash is building and the miser pile is now a mountain.
The BEA is finally giving us some interesting data in this BEA economic release, Summary Estimates for Multinational Companies: Employment, Sales, and Capital Expenditures for 2009. Their statistics show U.S. multinationals fired more Americans than those abroad during this recession, even while some of these companies were bailed out by U.S. taxpayers. Additionally, these same corporations clearly have been offshore outsourcing jobs over the last decade.
Surfing the Internets I found a most interesting post by Chris Gunn, SBA continues to fabricate contracting data. Oh really? It seems the Small Business administration likes to re-categorize large multinational corporations as Mom & Pop operations in order to award them large amounts of government dough!
This year the SBA awarded $93.3 billion to Small Business in 2008. It appears the SBA also missed it's target in small business contract awards by a good 1.5% (ignoring the awarding of contracts to those not qualified).
The numbers are significantly inflated with some of the largest corporations in the world. In some cases the numbers even appear to be the result of fabrication by high-level government officials at the SBA and other government agencies.
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