MarketWatch's Arends: Corporate Debt Market Is a Bomb About to Explode

``"All that talk you hear about how corporate balance sheets are in great shape is a bunch of hooey," he wrote. "Corporations borrowed $993 billion just in the first quarter of this year. Corporate debts have actually doubled since 1999. " ... In 2007, at the peak of the last credit binge, U.S. nonfinancial corporations owed $7.2 trillion. Today, after years of easy money and artificially low interest rates, they owe $9.6 trillion... Arends conclusion is that U.S. companies have used their profits and their debt in recent years to drive up their own stock prices.''