The 'Elephant in the Room' here is the chart they did not show, and it's interest rates, which have been steadily declining. You can't fight the impetus for the

The 'Elephant in the Room' here is the chart they did not show, and it's interest rates, which have been steadily declining. You can't fight the impetus for the system to want to give you free money because in the race to equilibrium, your competitor will do it, which leaves you with little choice. Imagine that some industries are 'thin margin' and naturally going to be competitive, and a little prone to failing if there is a hiccup. What 'low interest rates' do is exacerbate that quite a lot - so that only a little hiccup is needed to blow you up. There is a really, really interesting national parallel between the fall of Spain in the 2008 crisis and this story. The 'accepted narrative' is that when the Euro came along, Spain acted 'irresponsibly' and borrowed too much. But a more careful analysis (from an FT interview no less!) showed that they actually acted rationally given the very cheap money flowing in from 'Rich Europe' at the time. So the overarching issue is real: there's a lot of corporate debt. But it's a financing instrument like any other, it might actually make sense for companies to be leveraged to some extent. Credit runs the economy, this is a form of credit. I think a much bigger 'meta' look at this from the FT Economists would be warranted - instead of looking at this as more of a 'corporate activity' kind of thing, look at it from an economic equilibrium perspective in terms of defining 'how much debt' is actually good, or bad, and why.