> I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays into it. Think macro-level. It'

> I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays into it. Think macro-level. It's not that each individual firm says "oh, debt is cheap" and takes on more debt to increase spending. It's that economy-wide a lot of firms are responding to that incentive, and that increased spending is showing up at other firms as increased revenue (and at the macro level, as a general shift in demand). So your revenue goes up. What do you do with it? Well, if you have projects you could start or increase funding for that look like they'd be profitable, you do that. You might even leverage it a bit; if you think the risk-adjusted ROI of something is way higher than the interest rates you can get, why wouldn't you? And even if you think there's a good chance that the cheap credit dries up and the economy goes into recession, (a) leaving money on the table for a long-term bet isn't something most CEOs can pull off without shareholders fighting them on it, and (b) you're not actually aiming for zero layoffs -- any company that is innovating and iterating is going to need to lay off some people to match their workforce to their needs sometimes. Inflation's effects take place at the level of deep incentives. It's not something you can fix by thinking "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months."