The link here is over-confidence, as described by Ulrike Malmendier at the University of California Berkeley. She's shown that, in the US, chief executives who are over-confident are disproportionately likely to increase their capital spending when they have the cashflow to do so. When retained profits are high, CEOs are less constrained by having to explain their decisions to sceptical banks or capital markets, and so have more freedom to indulge their over-inflated belief that they can identify profitable ventures and manage them successfully.
And here's the thing. It's possible that, going into 2011, CEOs are unusually over-confident.