In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, former FDIC chair Sheila Bair accurately and succinctly assessed the bizarre financial landscape we find ourselves traversing.
I highly recommend Corporate Debt 'Relief' Is an Economic Dud.
Here are two snippets: emphasis mine...
"The creation of the corporate facilities last March marked the first time in history that the Fed would buy corporate debt. The plan went far beyond previous quantitative easing, in which the Fed bought up government-backed securities.
The purpose of the corporate facilities was to help companies access debt markets during the pandemic, making it possible to sustain operations and keep employees on payroll. Instead, the facilities resulted in a huge and unnecessary bailout of corporate debt issuers, underwriters and bondholders."
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"Capitalism doesn’t work unless capital costs something and markets don’t work unless they’re allowed to rise and fall.
The corporate facilities may have originally been justified as extraordinary one-off interventions to help companies maintain operations, but they morphed far beyond this purpose, and distorted capital allocation. The result was a windfall for investors, cheap credit for the un-creditworthy and record-shattering levels of corporate leverage. They should not become part of the Fed’s standard tool kit. Let them die."
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