Corporate America Is Ignoring Jay Powell and Bingeing on Debt (1)

For the past 18 months, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has frantically been trying to break Americans’ borrow-and-spend habits. It’s critical to his fight against inflation.

In C-suites across the country, though, CEOs and CFOs aren’t getting the message.

Not only have they displayed little desire to pay downdebt that’s become more expensive after 11 interest-rate hikes, but many of them have heaped more of it on their books, borrowing cash in bond markets to upgrade their operations, expand their businesses and fund share buybacks. (The surge in hiringin September, reported Friday morning, was just the latest evidence of ...