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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

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robin_reala·

Let’s compare Apple’s cash hoard against countries’ cash hoards rather than their GDP. Assuming the source data at:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

is correct then Apple slots in at position #4 (!), slightly ahead of Russia and quite a bit behind Germany.

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That's current accounts for the country (i.e. inflows less outflows), not "cash hoards". There's no easy way to measure a country's "cash hoard", as it were. GDP goes up with the number of transactions, even if there is no value added in each transaction. Money is just a way of making value liquid, fungible and transferrable etc.; the amount of it specifically is relatively meaningless, as banks etc. can multiply it based on reserve ratios.

I think every country in the world has a negative cash hoard, except perhaps Norway?

The amount of cash in your bank account has nothing to do with the amount of debt you have. In many cases the more debt you have the more cash you have because when you raise that debt through a bond issuance corporations receive the cash before spending it. It isn't like it is in the consumer world where you typically only acquire debt as loan for an asset (car, home, etc).

I was talking net.

> Let’s compare Apple’s cash hoard against countries’ cash hoards rather than their GDP.

Agreed. The comparison doesn't make sense as the numbers don't have the same units. $ vs $/year.

That certainly doesn’t mean that the comparison makes no sense. Apple’s current cash reserves are equal to what many countries produce in one year. That’s a perfectly valid and valuable comparison.

Why not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ext... ?

Because I finished my Economics classes aged 16 and have only a vague understanding of what the difference in all these different measurements is? :)

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