Oil Rig Drilling Hand Covered in Drilling Mud
Introduction
We've all heard the one about "the cleanest shirt in the dirty laundry." This comes up because with the incessant tinkering and manipulation of the markets by the Fed over the last 30 years, asset prices are now widely seen as pretty severely disconnected from reality (cf. Kevin Wilson, 2018a; Kevin Wilson, 2018b; Kevin Wilson, 2019a). For example, US corporate debt is the highest in many decades (Chart 1), primarily in support of debt-for-equity swaps and levered dividend payouts (Chart 2). Much