One of the biggest cat-and-mouse games in corporate finance is ending. Thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed into law in December, U.S. companies will no longer have an incentive to stash profits generated overseas to avoid high taxes at home. The new law dropped the U.S. corporate rate from 35% to 21%, put minimum levies on low-taxed foreign earnings, and imposed a one-time tax of 15.5% on cash parked outside the U.S.—which BofA Merrill Lynch estimates to be a total of $1.2 trillion for S&P 500 nonfinancials. In a survey, companies told BofA they were most likely to use the repatriated cash to pay down debt and buy back stock.
A version of this article appears in the March 2018 issue of Fortune with the headline “Cash Back.”
