It's an interesting counter to the efficient market hypothesis. "Everybody" knows about this debt. It's in the most public news outlets there are, and the word has been getting around. It's about as secret as Taylor Swift's concert schedules. Any serious investor knows about this debt.

And yet... the companies do this because it works. If they held this debt on balance sheet, the sensible assumption is that their stock values would take a rather substantial hit, and they could face other sorts of scrutiny. It works like pull-in sales works. It works like channel stuffing works. It works even when everybody knows that's what's happening. It works even when everybody knows that everybody knows that's what's happening.

There's something broken here. In an era where AIs move millions upon millions of dollars around because of some blip of a headline somewhere and every AI improvement of any kind is immediately scrutinized for its ability to be used by the financial system, it is completely incredible that the system doesn't know and react to these things. I'm not sure what's broken. My first best guess would be the increasingly mindless investment via index funds in pensions and the slow-but-ever-increasing ability of financial engineering to abuse that mindless investment, but I call that a "guess" for a reason. Possibly there's still a lot of really stupid AIs hooked up to the stock market that just look at the most basic of numbers and are easily fooled by this? But who is running such a precise combination of "huge" and "stupid" on the market? I dunno. Something's weird here.