OPINION: "Why Capital Structure Matters," by Michael Milken, Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2009.

Lotsa quoting here, because it's worth it and I can't write it any better, although I will comment within using brackets.

Thirty-five years ago business publications were writing that major money-center banks would fail, and quoted investors who said, "I'll never own a stock again!" Meanwhile, some state and local governments as well as utilities seemed on the brink of collapse. Corporate debt often sold for pennies on the dollar while profitable growing companies were starved for capital.

If that all sounds familiar today, it's worth remembering that 1974 [when I came of age, mind you, so it really sticks with me] was also a turning point. With financial institutions weakened by the recession, public and private markets began displacing banks as the source of most corporate financing. Bonds rallied strongly in 1975-76, providing underpinning for the stock market, which rose 75%. Some high-yield funds achieved unleveraged, two-year rates of return approaching 100%.

The accessibility of capital markets has grown continuously since 1974. Businesses are not as dependent on banks, which now own less than a third of the loans they originate. In the first quarter of 2009, many corporations took advantage of low absolute levels of interest rates to raise $840 billion in the global bond market. That's 100% more than in the first quarter of 2008, and is a typical increase at this stage of a market cycle. Just as in the 1974 recession, investment-grade companies have started to reliquify. Once that happens, the market begins to open for lower-rated bonds. Thus BB- and B-rated corporation are now raising capital through new issues of equity, debt and convertibles.

This cyclical process today appears to be where it was in early 1975, when balance sheets began to improve and corporations with strong capital structures started acquiring others . . .

Over the past four decades, many companies have struggled with the wrong capital structures. During cycles of credit expansion, companies have often failed to build enough liquidity to survive the inevitable contractions. Especially vulnerable are enterprises with unpredictable revenue streams that end up with too much debt during business slowdowns. It happened 40 years ago, it happened 20 years ago, and it's happening again . . .

The current recession started in real estate, just as in 1974. Back then, many real-estate investment trusts lost as much as 90% of their value in less than a year because they were too highly leveraged and too dependent on commercial paper at a time when interest rates were doubling. This time around it was a combination of excessive leverage in real-estate-related financial instruments, a serious lowering of underwriting standards, and ratings that bore little relationship to reality [all deeply encouraged by the global structural trade imbalance that kept our money so amazingly cheap in cost of usage]. The experience of both periods highlights two fallacies that seem to recur in 20-year cycles: that any loan to real estate is a good loan, and that property values always rise. Fact: Over the past 120 years, home prices have declined about 40% of the time.

History isn't a sine wave of endlessly repeated patterns. It's more like a helix that brings similar events around in a different orbit. But what we see today does echo the 1970s, as companies use the capital markets to push out debt maturities and pay off loans. That gives them breathing room and provides hope that history will repeat itself in a strong economic recovery . . .

Got it?