You seem to assume that the publicly available financial statements honestly reflect reality. Any rational review of the past statements from such corporations such as GM, Enron and half of the Fortune 500 should expose the lie in this belief for even yourself.
Again again, your lack of accounting knowledge shows. Enron didn't lie. GM definitely didn't lie. Half the Fortune 500 companies don't lie.
Enron used created accounting that isn't allowed anymore. It wasn't lies, it just took an intelligent person knowing what they're looking for to find out what condition the company was actually in. Everyone was too busy being greedy and getting rich off the stock that no one gave enough of a shit to give the financials any more than a quick glance - not at all unlike the Madoff scheme.
GM didn't lie, they just sucked. Everyone knew and acknowledged they sucked except the management, which is why they went down the shitter. There was no false financial statements involved.
Get your facts straight before attempting to BS.
Those facilities can, and generally are, provided by the oil companies as part of the futures contracts. Thus oil and steel can be bought and sold as easily as corporate bonds, and thus are liquid assets. I can buy a futures contract for vastly more oil than I can actually do anything with, with a built in delivery date three months out, and sell it to a refinery (or anyone else) two days before delivery confirmation.
Holding futures contracts with absolutely no intent of taking delivery != holding physical oil. That type of activity is used for hedging and doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with what you were talking about. Keep trying to rationalize it though, if you travel down enough irrelevant roads you might be able to salavage your grossly incorrect original statement.
As noted above, yes they are liquid enough to be considered as part of the 'cash reserve' figure in a summary financial statement, if the trading of such commodities is not a fundamental part of the corporation's core business model.
See above. Contracts for the purpose of hedging are not physical assets. Physical assets are not liquid.
This seems like a great place for a quote from a recent Wiskey & Gunpowder article (commodities traders, Wiskey & Gunpowder, get it?)
"Oh dear. The gold price in dollars is volatile because the US dollar is volatile. An ounce of gold has almost always bought you a nice suit at any time in history.
Good thing I bought a suit last month, because their prices have shot up over $300 since then.
The gold/suit example is the most ridiculous, not to mention untrue, (and most often used by the gold bugs) of all. I didn't realize that suits were the best (or even a good) reference for comparative value. Someone tell the Fed to stop using a large basket of goods to calculate CPI and just use the average price of a suit.