Do you think big corps convert their retained earnings to cash and stuff it under their mattress?

“BigCorp Ireland, Ltd” buys a bunch of treasuries.

So they're lending money to the government, who spends it.

All BigCorp Ireland LTD has is a brokerage account full of ISIN codes.

That doesn’t sound like a typical business argument. We could more efficiently get the money in the government treasury by skipping the corporate middleman and taxing it.

How are those tbills delivering value to the shareholders?

Collecting and accounting for tax is far far more inefficient than buying electronic tbills.

And they pay interest to the holder...

The point is, the money isn't keeping out of the economy. It's loaned to the government who spends it.

You do realize that nobody keeps that cash on hand, right? It’s in banks where it gets lent out, thus participating and contributing to the economy.

"Hoarding" is nonsense.

How are the nearly $2 trillion of bank reserves at the Fed contributing? That’s a significant portion of the total money supply.

Most of the corporate cash isn’t in equity funds, it in US Treasury debt. Apple holds >$50B of treasury securities, for example.

The low inflation monetary policy has some benefits, but combined with our ass-backwards tax system also makes for strong disincentive to do anything with excess cash.

Money in the government coffers is spent and used by the government. Again, a good thing (as far as government spending can be called a good thing, of course).

It plowed into low productivity assets like real estate, in an endless cycle of increasing real estate costs.

The effect is almost identical.