The way they handled it was to borrow funds using the cash as collateral. They could put $1B in Bank X, then would borrow $1B from Bank X, using their cash in

The way they handled it was to borrow funds using the cash as collateral. They could put $1B in Bank X, then would borrow $1B from Bank X, using their cash in Bank X as security. If you squint it might almost look like they were borrowing their own money :). I'm not that onto the details here so this might be totally wrong - but I didn't wonder why Apple had so much debt one time and this is what I think I was looking at. One risk if they didn't repay and the bank took collateral would be that they would then have had to pay the taxes (it would have counted as a repatriation). They must have thought the risk was reasonably low.