Ostensibly, company valuation should be reflective of the sum of its future cash flows discounted back to today, with the discount rate being the risk free rate

Ostensibly, company valuation should be reflective of the sum of its future cash flows discounted back to today, with the discount rate being the risk free rate + risk premium (simplifying). If the risk free rate increases, the discount rate increases, if the discount rate increases, future cash flows become meaningfully less valuable than current cash flows. Which means that at the margin, management teams are incentivized to produce higher near term cash flows at the expensive of future ones, one way of doing that is reducing costs…