Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/228533 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] New Political Economy [ISSN:] 1469-9923 [Issue:] Latest Articles [Publisher:] Taylor & Francis [Place:] London [Year:] 2021
Publisher: 
Taylor & Francis, London
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.
Subjects: 
capital as power
corporate concentration
Covid-19 crisis
debt
leverage
JEL: 
P16
H63
G3
Published Version’s DOI: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Manuscript Version (Preprint)

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