Ahead of the Curve: The Concentration of Corporate Debt

What We’re Reading

Below are links to recent articles we found interesting (no partnerships expressed or implied).

The Concentration of Corporate Debt
(Axios) Non-financial S&P 500 companies with the least cash are piling on the biggest loads of debt. According to the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, more than half of the S&P 500’s total cash is held within just 25 companies — or the top 5% — while the bottom 95% of companies hold 73% of the index’s debt.

What Google Learned in its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

(CNBC) In 2012, Google embarked on a quest to discover how to build the “perfect team.” The experiment, led by Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, was called “Project Aristotle.” After years of analyzing data and interviews from more than 180 teams across the company, Google found that the kinds of people (a.k.a the individual personalities) in a team are not so relevant.

FTC Announces Revised Hart-Scott-Rodino Thresholds for 2019
(National Law Review) The FTC announced its annual adjustments to the HSR filing thresholds for deals signed in 2019. These new thresholds represent a 6.6% increase over the 2018 thresholds and will become effective at the end of Q1 ’19.

Global Corporate Venture Capital Accelerates to All-Time Highs
(CB Insights) Corporate Venture Capital refers to the type of funding where corporations invest in startups through an investment arm. Famous examples include Microsoft’s venture subsidiary M12, or Alphabet’s GV. 2018 was a historic year for corporate venture activity, as they invested nearly $53 Billion across 2,740 deals.

Using M&A to Ride the Tide of Disruption
(Bain & Company) The year 2018 will be remembered as the year that the word disruption gained prominence in the business lexicon. Executives grappled with the convergence of e-commerce, data analytics, mobile capabilities, the Internet of Things and other fast-moving digital advances, and found themselves questioning how their business models might be made obsolete and how they should respond. For these and other questions facing business leaders, M&A turned out to be a big part of the answer.