Depositors of banks in Cyprus now fear they have less money than they thought while US corporations have plenty of cash to hand – $1.45tn and rising, according to Moody’s. But whose money is it, anyway?

Michael Dell clearly thinks it is his. The Dell founder wants to repatriate up to $7.4bn of his company’s overseas cash hoard in order to help finance his bid to take it private with Silver Lake, the private equity firm. Activist investors such as Carl Icahn and David Einhorn think more should be given to shareholders, to prevent executives wasting it.

This in turn outrages Martin Lipton, the lawyer who invented the poison-pill defence. He believes they are “sacrificing the future for a quick buck” and compares pressure on US technology enterprises to share cash to the “bootstrap, bust-up, junk-bond takeovers” of the past, which “laid waste to the future of many great companies”.