No longer. For many big American companies, the day of reckoning came two months ago when the deepening financial crisis brought about the abrupt closure of the overnight commercial-paper market. This briefly sent even the most solid companies into a desperate scramble to find money to meet such basic obligations as paying their staff. Since then, the guiding principle for managers everywhere has been to gather up whatever cash they can find, and then do their damnedest to keep as much of it as possible for as long as possible.

For some firms — the investment banks or the Detroit carmakers — this struggle is already a very public affair. But most of the panic is still hidden. In Britain solid corporate giants are finding it harder to roll over routine loans. Across Europe nervous accountants say they will need to see more proof that firms are “going concerns” before they sign off year-end accounts. In America Fortune 500 firms now face questions from investors about how long their cash will last at current “burn rates”. In Silicon Valley, Sequoia, a venture-capital firm, recently told the small businesses in which it has invested to treat every dollar as if it was the last they would ever raise, to cut jobs and scale back growth plans that were not immediately “cashflow-positive”. And the emerging world is not immune: witness a stiff e-mail from Ratan Tata to managers at India’s bellwether Tata group telling them to undertake “a critical review of their cashflow requirements and business plans”.

From a leader in ‘The Economist’, November 20