Entering 2020, corporate treasury professionals were worried. When we published the Treasury & Risk "2019 Cash Management Survey" last November, it seemed that "uncertainty in the global economy [was] causing businesses to entrench and build their cash reserves to weather any financial downturn," according to Hung Nguyen, director of sales North America for BELLIN.

Indeed, that's what the data showed. Over the course of 2019, cash reserves had grown in 42 percent of organizations, and had grown by more than 10 percent in 2 out of 10 companies. Meanwhile, cash holdings had decreased in only 22 percent of organizations. Stockpiling cash seemed to be a priority for many businesses late last year.

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Then, when asked which single factor they expected to have the most impact on cash reserves over the upcoming year, respondents selected "uncertainty in global business climate" as their third-most-prevalent choice. Among the 5 percent who selected "Other," several wrote in answers such as "anticipation of a recession in the next year" and "potential for a recession." Little did they know what 2020 would entail!

Even the pessimists who took the survey in early autumn of 2019 could not have predicted the havoc Covid-19 would wreak on the global economy. Still, their expectations were closer to reality than those of the quarter of respondents who believed last year that increases in operating cash flows would be the largest driver of their company's cash reserves in 2020, or the 8 percent who saw increasing capital expenditures as the biggest influencer of their level of cash holdings. (See Figure 1, below.) It seems unlikely that very many businesses have seen jumps in operating cash flows or capex over the past six months.