My Name is Bonds, Worthless Bonds

Today gives us an advert (the whole pg. A5 in my dead trees version) in the name of Morgan Stanley's Vishy Tirupattur. The gist of the advert is that corporate bonds are still really, really good.

Over the last 10 years, interest rates have been unusually low, spurring companies to borrow heavily and investors to load up on those bonds.
...
That doesn't mean corporate bonds are too risky -- it means investors have to be smarter than ever...

What is missing from the advert: how have corporations used all that moolah. Aye, matey, thar's the rub. One report describing where the moolah went.

Since 2010, thanks to the policies of low interest rates practised by the Central Banks of the most industrialised countries (Federal Reserve (The Fed) in the US, European Central Bank(ECB), Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Swiss National Bank, among others), the big Corporations have become massively more indebted. In the U.S. for example, corporate debt increased by $7,800 billion between 2010 and mid-2017.

What have they done with the money? Have they invested in research and development, in production, in the ecological transition, in creating descent jobs, warding off climate change? Not at all!

If you squint, at least I had to, you can see that 'capital expenditures' went from 40% of cash to 20%. The beauty of financial engineering.