Liquidity preferences are one of the least discussed economic concepts. There are several channels into which monetary instability can hamper the real economy. A “dollar” squeeze doesn’t just impact banks, they often pass it along further down the economic chain.

In its most extreme form, we had something like 2009. Some of the best companies all over the world found themselves stranded through nothing they had done. The Great “Recession” was bad, meaning even the best businesses suffered on revenue and profits. But even sure-survivors were shut off from cash, abandoned by banks and funding markets at the worst possible time.

I’m talking about companies like McDonalds which needed (and always needs) to fund working capital regardless of health, ill or not, on its top or bottom lines. Banks withdrew liquidity backstops and credit lines, and then commercial paper became impossible to negotiate on reasonable terms.

Some like McDonalds, Verison, and Caterpillar were forced to almost beg. In one of the more absurd aspects of the 2008 panic, there was the global fastfood chain knocking at the door of the Federal Reserve getting it to buy commercial paper the market wouldn’t on any terms. Big Macs had become Too Big To Fail, too.

What do you do if as a C-Suite officer you found yourself in such a situation? The first thing is that you vow never to be so vulnerable again. As a company, you make it a policy, informal or otherwise, to self-insure on liquidity. That means any number of things, up to and including holding large cash balances far greater than you ever would have before August 2007.

It also means managing your cost structure down the tenth of a penny in search of hidden future liquidity risks. Hiring new workers and building new facilities are in terms of cash huge, huge commitments beyond today. The standards for undertaking them just added a new chapter.

And if the overall economy is at best lackluster on top of all this?