The Great Debt Divergence and its Implications for the Covid-19 Crisis: Mapping Corporate Leverage as Power

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