Overview:
We start with the end of 2019 as a time when many companies issued low-cost debt to buy back shares and/or to aggressively acquire other companies and to thus leverage their balance sheet into danger zones.
Most of these activities were initiated to satisfy buyback cheerleaders such as corporate raiders, various types of fund managers as well as CEOs and board members tied to share-price compensation. With few exceptions, such corporate leaders and boards, all of whom should have known better, displayed an ignorance and lackadaisical obliviousness as to the macroeconomic risks that have