Revenue Rise with Loans

I once worked with a telecommunications company whose mission included the goal “to maximize our stock portfolio.” The leadership decided this meant they should partner with a financial institution in order to manage their portfolio more efficiently. What they needed was a partner to help them—an investment bank—but what they did was acquire a bank [...]

Having focused on indicators for the overall level of leverage so far, we will now switch to metrics that relate the ability to generate cash flows and profits to the interest burden. This helps to better capture liquidity problems in the short term, but goes at the expense of understanding the longer term vulnerability of [...]

While the choice of the most appropriate measure of corporate leverage is an arbitrary task, empirical studies indicate that the financing gap is able  to explain a lot of the variance in credit spreads. It is defined as the difference between capital expenditures, including outlays for inventories, and the amount of cash that corporations need [...]

So far, we have identified a close correlation between credit spreads and future economic activity. When the economy is growing, usually each sector benefits from that growth. In the labor sector, economic growth typically leads to falling unemployment and rising wages. Historically, the corporate sector has benefited particularly during economic expansions. Not only did corporate [...]

Generally, in growing economies the nominal level of debt rises over the years. This is mostly because of inflation and a steady growth in balance sheets. The long-term upward trend has accelerated sharply since 1980, coinciding with the sustained fall in short- and long-term interest rates and inflation rates. Since then, the steadily falling level [...]

For decades economists have analyzed the behavior of various economic indicators during the business cycle. Employment is commonly seen as one of the lagging indicators for the state of the economy. However, there is a leading indicator for the labor sector that coincides with changes in credit spreads. For example, for most of the time [...]