• D: All Things Digital , Wednesday, February 18, 2009 12:15 PM

An economic crisis may be at hand, but today's tech giants are still sitting on a pile of cash, notes BoomTown's Kara Swisher. Cisco leads the pack with $29.5 billion, followed by Apple, $25.6 billion, Microsoft, $20.7 billion, Google, $15.9 billion, Intel, $11.8 billion, Oracle, $10.6 billion, HP, $10.2 billion, and Yahoo, $3.5 billion. That's quite a list, and collectively, quite a pile of cash.

Swisher notes that each of these companies typically generates nice cash flow each quarter--even in a downturn--and that Google and Apple have absolutely no debt, while the others have little to speak of. Tech companies don't generally like to hand over dividends or buy back much stock, either, which leads Swisher to the pertinent question: when will these tech giants start buying?

"Like everyone else, we are waiting for the bottom," said an exec at one of the aforementioned companies. "So who knows?" Said another: "No one wants to buy when prices could just keep going down. The trick is to buy before the really great deals out there collapse." Meanwhile, startups, some of which are still barely afloat, don't want to sell out at fire-sale prices. "We will start eating our toner and paper first," joked one cash-strapped startup exec.

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