> they prefer to hold cash at -2% real return. I'm not trained in any sort of finance, and not that this invalidates your point, but I believe it's not literal

> they prefer to hold cash at -2% real return. I'm not trained in any sort of finance, and not that this invalidates your point, but I believe it's not literal cash cash. It's just low-risk, liquid investments. From the Alphabet Investor Relations page (https://abc.xyz/investor/ https://abc.xyz/investor/), you can find a link to their 2019 Form 10-K (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204420000008/goog10-k2019.htm#sA684753F92655042AAF482AB21F2C37B https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204420...). P. 50 of that has a balance sheet, where you can see that at the end of 2019, they had $18.5 billion in "Cash and cash equivalents" and $101.2 billion in "Marketable securities". So about 15% of it is cash, and the other 85% is some kind of investment. Then, on p. 56, they give a little more detail what these categories mean: > Cash equivalents and marketable securities consist primarily of time deposits, money market and other funds, highly liquid debt instruments of the U.S. government and its agencies, debt instruments issued by foreign governments, debt instruments issued by municipalities in the U.S., corporate debt securities, mortgage-backed securities, and asset-backed securities. Anyway, they are probably getting a real return better than -2%. Maybe even slightly positive.