Why does ExxonMobil's balance sheet show more liabilities than assets?
"You are reading the balance sheet wrong. Everything Joe says is completely correct, but more fundamentally you have missed out on a huge pile of assets. ""Current assets"" is only short term assets. You have omitted more than $300B in long-term assets, primarily plant and equipment. The balance sheet explicitly says: Net tangible Assets (i.e. surplus of assets over liabilities) $174B" Exxon Mobil is one of the most profitable corporations in the world.  Their annual earnings are typically in the $10s of billions of dollars.  They have revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.  They also return $10+ billion dollars to their stockholders each year in dividends and stock purchases.  That's with $300bn market capitalization - meaning they return 3% of their total market cap each year to their shareholders, aside from any movement in the stock itself. On the other hand, their total current liabilities are around $175bn.  That's what, six months' revenue?  Who'd you rather lend to, Exxon, or ... anyone else?  AAPL and GOOG maybe better risks, but not by much.  Almost every other company on the planet is a more dangerous risk. Judging them solely by Assets is silly - they don't exactly sit on the oil they extract.  They take it out of the ground and sell it to people. Even assuming you were reading the balance sheet correctly it means nothing. What banks mostly care about is cash flow.  Do they have enough extra money to make the payments on whatever they borrow? I have never had a credit card company ask me about assets--they don't care.  They care about income with which to pay the credit card bill. Have a solid record of paying your bills and enough income to pay back what you are trying to borrow and you'll have an excellent credit rating no matter what your net worth.  Whether you are one person or a megacorporation makes no difference. I believe you are missing knowledge of how to conduct a ratio analysis. Understanding liquidity ratios, specifically the quick or acid-test ratio will be of interest and help your understanding. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/acidtest.asp Help with conducting a ratio analysis. http://www.demonstratingvalue.org/resources/financial-ratio-analysis Finally, after working through the definitions, this website will be of use. https://www.stock-analysis-on.net/NYSE/Company/Exxon-Mobil-Corp/Ratios/Liquidity
"This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://bruegel.org/2017/09/the-feds-unwinding/) reduced by 95%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; In Hamilton&amp;#039;s simulation, if the Fed were to continue reducing its balance sheet through the end of 2020, the level of Fed deposits by financial institutions may not be enough to cover the plausible variation in other Fed liabilities.  &gt; The political power of worries about the Fed&amp;#039;s balance sheet will help determine the endpoint for the Fed&amp;#039;s balance-sheet.  &gt; Given the profitability, prestige and jobs created by maintaining the Fed&amp;#039;s large balance sheet, it will not be painless for the Fed to shrink it.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/72i01i/the_feds_unwinding/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~216580 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **Fed**^#1 **rate**^#2 **balance**^#3 **sheet**^#4 **bank**^#5" 20% is almost certainly too high. I agree with 2%, as a very rough rule. It will vary significantly depending on the industry. I generally calculate an average of the previous 2-3 years working capital, and deduct that from cash. Working capital is Current Assets less Current Liabilities. Current Assets is comprised of cash, prepaid expenses, and significantly, accounts receivable. This means that CA is likely to be much higher than just cash, which leaves more excess cash after liabilities are deducted. Which reduces EV, which makes the EV/EBITDA ratio look even more pricey, as Dimitri noted. But a balance sheet is just a snapshot of the final day of the quarter. As such, and because of seasonal effects, it's critical to smooth this by averaging several periods. After calculating this for a few companies, compare to revenue. Is it close to 2%? "I'm a mathematician, not an accountant.  But my feeling has been that the distinction between Asset and Liability is mainly a sign convention, and comes from a wish to avoid negative numbers. Suppose you take out a loan for $1000 and deposit the proceeds in your bank account.  Under normal accounting conventions, your bank account is an Asset and the loan is a Liability.  After the loan, Bank has a balance of 1000 and Loan has a balance of 1000.  You can compute your net worth by adding all Assets and subtracting all Liabilities (so in this case your net worth remains 0). If you treat Loan as an Asset account, then after taking out the loan, you should give it a balance of -1000.  Under this convention, you have lots of negative numbers to deal with everywhere, which I suspect early accountants would have found inconvenient.  The Asset/Liability convention means you only need to deal with negative numbers in unusual situations (overdrawn bank account, overpaid loan, etc). Likewise, in theory you could treat Expense accounts as negative Income. But I'm not sure why you feel the need to reinvent the wheel by ""simplifying"" double-entry accounting like this.  The standard conventions are not that complicated, and their major advantage is that they're standard: other people will be able to understand your books if they ever need to.  (Say you want to hire somebody to do your taxes at some point: if your books are kept in your own idiosyncratic system, their job will be at best error-prone and at worst impossible.)   It's a bit like a proposal to simplify English spelling: shur, a sistum waar yu rit lik this mit bee simplur in sum abstrakt sens, but if nobudee els can reed it eezulee, it izunt ackshyualee veree yusful." "A $1 note and four quarters are both real money, but how (and when) they become real money is different. The important thing is that the Fed's stockpile of cash that it gets from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing isn't ""real money"" (i.e. M0) yet. That cash is only used for fulfilling withdrawals from reserve accounts. You can't use it to buy a car, or a house, or to pay Janet Yellen's salary...no one, not even Janet, can use even a single dollar to buy a Diet Coke. In other words, it's not really an asset. Or a liability. Or anything but a stack of paper in the Fed's vaults that looks astonishingly like money, but isn't. The upside to this is that when the BEP makes a delivery of fresh bills to the Fed, or when the Fed destroys old, ratty bills that aren't usable anymore, the Fed's balance sheet doesn't change. That's good! Those are practical considerations, not financial ones. The downside is that there's nothing on the asset side of the sheet to explain how the Fed's liability to a bank is reduced when the bank makes a cash withdrawal from its reserve account. So the Fed balances it's balance sheet by recording an increase in a different liability: the cash in circulation. Kinda like transferring the balance on a credit card: you're paying down one liability by increasing another one. It looks a bit silly, but less silly than recording the destruction of old bills as an ""expense"" of the face value of the bills. Coins, on the other hand, become money as soon as the Treasury gets them from the Mint. If they wanted to, they could pay their employees' salaries by ordering coins from the Mint for cheap, giving them to their employees at face value, and reaping fat profits as a result. In fact, that's pretty much exactly what they do: when someone wants quarters, the Treasury mints them at less than face value and then sells them at face value. In practice the Fed does all of this buying and then distributes the coins according to demand. The important thing is that this bunch of coins is not like the Fed's stockpile of bills. It's already real money, and therefore shows up as an asset. Not much. If the Fed bought coins at the cheaper price from the Mint instead, stockpiled them like they stockpile bills, then distributed them as usual, the extra profit just goes to the Treasury anyway, like all the Fed's profit does. However, as things are, the Fed's purchases of coins are recorded on the Fed's balance sheet at face value, which is kinda silly." Maybe, I'm confused too...but I would have to disagree, the numbers wouldn't be the same.  Also, they are not the same thing.  * NOA = Operating assets - Operating Liabilities * IC = Equity + Debt  Example: Company has $1000 Equity, $1000 Debt, $2000 Assets  * Company's NOA is $1000 * Company's IC is $2000 Oh hey, let's take an insane valuation from the peak of the tech bubble and act like it should be a useful metric. Exxon has a market cap around 430 billion, Apple is just under 600 billion.    Microsoft was never making enough nor looked like it could sustain enough growth to support a 600b market cap.  Don't be stupid.  The stock was grossly overvalued as everything was then. "The ""just accounting"" is how money market works these days. Lets look at this simplified example: The bank creates an asset - loan in the amount of X, secured by a house worth 1.25*X (assuming 20% downpayment). The bank also creates a liability in the amount of X to its depositors, because the money lent was the money first deposited into the bank by someone else (or borrowed by the bank from the Federal Reserve(*), which is, again, a liability). That liability is not secured. Now the person defaults on the loan in the amount of X, but at that time the prices dropped, and the house is now worth 0.8*X. The bank forecloses, sells the house, recovers 80% of the loan, and removes the asset of the loan, creating an asset of cash in the value of 0.8*X. But the liability in the amount of X didn't go anywhere. Bank still has to repay the X amount of money back to its depositors/Feds. The difference? 20% of X in our scenario - that's the bank's loss. (*) Federal Reserve is the US equivalent of a central bank." "I found your post while searching for this same exact problem. Found the answer on a different forum about a different topic, but what you want is a Cash Flow report.  Go to Reports>Income & Expenses>Cash Flow - then in Options, select the asset accounts you'd like to run the report for (""Calle's Checking"" or whatever) and the time period. It will show you a list of all the accounts (expense and others) with transactions effecting that asset. You can probably refine this further to show only expenses, but I found it useful to have all of it listed.  Not the prettiest report, but it'll get your there."