[rscale]

I had the same immediate reaction. Low-cost debt is a very useful tool for long-lived institutions. I'm certain that a few institutions are using it naively or foolishly, but the existence of debt doesn't prove the existence of a problem.

The graphs they chose for the article are also absolutely uninformative. As an example, the top graph indicates that long-term debt grew substantially faster than instruction costs from 2002-2008, but that's exactly what I would expect given that instruction costs were relatively static, but interest rates plummeted.