Recent Trends in Corporate Finance: Some Evidence from the Canadian System of National Accounts - ARCHIVED

Corporations have been posting record profits over much of the last decade. Meanwhile, business fixed capital investment has been relatively sluggish in recent years. This situation has led to a significant shift in the corporate sectors' net lending/borrowing position - from one of a chronic deficit position to one of sustained surplus. After having run deficits for almost 30 years, corporations have emerged with significant surplus positions in the last decade. This has placed the corporate sector in a new role - that of increasingly supplying funds to the rest of the economy.

This note looks at this development from a few angles, focusing on non-financial corporations. It identifies the underlying causes for, and the major effects of, the development of an expanding corporate surplus position. In short, non-financial corporations have taken advantage of record profits, historically low interest rates and relatively buoyant stock markets to substantially re-structure their balance sheets. It has reached the point where corporate finances, in aggregate, are the healthiest they have been in the last thirty years.