Debtors Prison

The intellectual fashion has been for companies to have “efficient” balance-sheets. If cash is not immediately needed to reinvest in the business, it should be handed back to shareholders, who can use it more profitably elsewhere. Hoarding cash for a rainy day was seen as a failure of executive imagination.

Corporate-finance theory may state that the value of a company should not be affected by its decision to finance itself with equity or debt. But, in practice, interest payments are generally tax-deductible; dividends are not. That gives companies a big push in the direction of debt.

Buttonwood in the Economist.