My Bloomberg subscription suspended. Now my financial news largely comes from The Wall Street Journal. Not ideal (always better to get news from multiple sources), but I think their coverage of the Coronavirus has been fairly good? Anyway, I’ve still been wondering about all the debt – consumer debt, corporate debt, government debt, etc. – that was accumulating before and will continue to build  after this public health crisis. Here are some older WSJ articles that I came across on the topic, some of which I have yet to read.

• Coronavirus Crisis Legacy: Mountains of Debt from April 9 (read April 10, 2020)
• Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class from August 1, 2019
• The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis from June 7, 2019
• The Next Coronavirus Financial Crisis: Record Piles of Risky Corporate Debt from March 19

The last article touches on leveraged loans and CLOs. I need / want to do a little more reading on them, but I know leveraged loans are used by private equity firms in company buyouts. Unfortunately, studies have shown that PE funds laden some of their portfolio companies with such high levels of debt that their bankruptcy rate is several times higher than that of their public company counterparts. This was an interesting article from last year on the subject.

Also, OECD raised concerns over the level of corporate debt before the Coronavirus crisis really hit.