I mean everyone talks about 0% percent interest rates.
Effectively, why didn't businesses just borrow a boat load of cash - any sane person could posit that it wouldn't last forever, after all - and build up hoards of cash independent of revenue for the future, as to deploy it when everything craters, there by making things like hiring and acquisitions cheap?
That seems like it would have been a good use of money, what everyone effectively is saying (talking head media wise) is that businesses were able to get money at "little to no cost". It seems likely then, that borrowing enormous amounts of cash, investing it in relatively safe growth securities, and waiting for your competitors to eventually crater because they are living high on borrowed time would have been a viable strategy for some businesses.
Some definitely did. I distinctly recall my previous employer saying they were doing exactly that 5-6 years ago during an earnings call (keeping a large loan balance because interest rates were low, and they could use the money in the future).
Effectively, why didn't businesses just borrow a boat load of cash - any sane person could posit that it wouldn't last forever, after all - and build up hoards of cash independent of revenue for the future, as to deploy it when everything craters, there by making things like hiring and acquisitions cheap?
That seems like it would have been a good use of money, what everyone effectively is saying (talking head media wise) is that businesses were able to get money at "little to no cost". It seems likely then, that borrowing enormous amounts of cash, investing it in relatively safe growth securities, and waiting for your competitors to eventually crater because they are living high on borrowed time would have been a viable strategy for some businesses.