A liquidity preference approach to nonfinancial corporate liquid asset holdings

This paper examines the long-run pattern of the U.S. nonfinancial corporate sector’s liquid financial asset holdings in the period from 1951 to 2018. My approach to examining this pattern builds from the banks’ liquidity preference theory put forward in Keynes’ 1937 papers, as well as Minsky’s 1957 paper discussing the role of financial innovation in the banks’ management of liquidity preference. I argue that financial intermediaries affect nonfinancial corporations’ liquid asset holdings through two primary money creation channels: (1) banks’ commercial and industrial loans advanced to nonfinancial corporations and (2) the liquidity premium of financial intermediaries, which can be measured by the interest rate spread in the intermediaries’ liabilities markets. Through theoretical and empirical exercises, I find that these two endogenous liquidity creation channels have been the important factors accounting for liquid asset accumulation by the nonfinancial corporate sector. Overall, my results suggest that financial innovations, structural changes of the U.S. financial system, and financial intermediaries’ liquidity premium could contribute to our understanding of the shift in nonfinancial corporations’ asset portfolio composition in favor of liquid financial assets.