ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified longstanding concerns about mounting levels of corporate debt in the United States. This article places the current conjuncture in its historical context, analysing corporate indebtedness against the backdrop of increasing corporate concentration. Theorising leverage as a form of power, we find that the leverage of large non-financial firms increased in recent decades, while their debt servicing burdens decreased. At the same time, smaller firms experienced sharp deleveraging alongside increasing debt servicing costs. Crucially, smaller corporations also registered severe losses over this period, while large corporations remained profitable, and in fact doubled their net profit margins from the early-1990s to the present. Taken together, the results from our mapping exercise uncover a series of dramatic changes in the financial fortunes of large versus smaller firms in recent decades, a phenomenon we refer to as the great debt divergence. We explain this divergence with reference to the dynamics of power in the era of ‘shareholder capitalism’, and we argue that the US political economy in the post-COVID 19 world is likely to resemble the pre-COVID 19 one, only with more market turmoil, more concentration, more inequality, and even less investment.

摘要

COVID-19 大流行加剧了长期以来对美国公司债务水平不断上升的担忧。本文将当前形势置于其历史背景下，分析企业集中度不断提高的背景下的企业债务。将杠杆理论作为一种权力形式，我们发现大型非金融企业的杠杆在近几十年来有所增加，而它们的偿债负担却有所下降。与此同时，规模较小的公司经历了急剧的去杠杆化，同时还增加了偿债成本。至关重要的是，小公司在此期间也录得严重亏损，而大公司仍然盈利，实际上从 1990 年代初到现在，其净利润率翻了一番。综合起来，巨大的债务分歧。我们参考“股东资本主义”时代的权力动态来解释这种分歧，我们认为 COVID 19 后世界的美国政治经济很可能与 COVID 19 之前的政治经济相似，只是有更多的市场动荡、更多的集中、更多的不平等，甚至更少的投资。