US Corporations Have Lots Of Debt And Not Much Cash: CLSA

Debt is the issue: While the headlines of Valeant’s negative plunge centered on wrongdoing and price increases resulting from mergers, some short sellers who were critical of the stock looked at the corporate debt load with concern. Once the Valeant machine reached a certain negative revenue to debt point, the debt would subsume the organization, was the thesis.

With this in mind a new CLSA piece is showing that corporate debt as a whole is set to get much larger – as much as 50% larger – and could reach $75 trillion by 2020, up from nearly $50 trillion currently. When compared to estimated GDP growth, the growth in corporate debt is moving at nearly a five times as fast...