There is a cash crisis in corporate America—although it comes not from a shortage of the stuff, but from a surplus.

In the first quarter, the five companies with the greatest cash hoards—Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Google, Apple and Johnson & Johnson—added $15 billion in cash and marketable securities to their balance sheets. Microsoft alone packed away roughly $9 billion, or $100 million a day. All told, the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are sitting on more than $960 billion in cash, a record.

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