Rate cuts are coming soon to the allegedly over-budget construction site that is the Marriner Eccles building. They can’t come fast enough for America’s corporate “have-nots.”

I’ve been on (and on) over the years about the extent to which the criminally inegalitarian character of American society’s mirrored among the ranks of the country’s corporate “citizens.”

The self-perpetuating spiral dynamic that’s concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of fewer than a dozen individuals is doing the same for the market-caps of the top 10 or so largest US companies. It’s no coincidence there’s significant overlap between the richest people and the most dominant corporates.

In the “normal” course of “healthy” capitalism (lots of scare quotes there), I don’t have a problem with inequality, per se. Brutal as this always sounds, it’s imperative that the system allows for some people and companies to succeed on a scale that pauperizes everybody else. If the system doesn’t permit that, the motivation for exceptional people to innovate and create will be insufficient. Don’t shoot the messenger, folks. We’re an avaricious species.

That said, the scope of inequality in the 2020s, and particularly the perpetual motion machine that’s making gods of men like Elon Musk and distorting markets such that the fate of benchmark equity indexes is on some days decided by the performance of just one or two companies, isn’t healthy nor is it conducive to any sort of progress. (On the contrary in a lot of respects.)

With all of the above in mind, it’s worth highlighting updated versions of a few familiar charts from SocGen’s Andrew Lapthorne. The figures below break down interest burden by market-cap. The chart on the left just shows the interest rate paid by market segment. Small-caps pay about 7%, 300bps higher than the top 10% of US corporates.

The figure on the right shows the rate net of interest earned on parked corporate cash. The rate for small-caps (and for the bottom half of the S&P 1500) is virtually unchanged on that metric for one simple reason: They don’t have much parked cash. The biggest names, on the other hand, have lots of it and when you account for what that cash earns, the effective rate paid by those behemoths is 100bps lower (3% versus 4%).

Crucially for the Fed discussion, the maturity wall for lesser corporates is dauntingly steep, and the clock’s tickin,’ so to speak.

As the figure on the left, below, reminds you, S&P 500 companies have very little use for revolvers and not much in the way of loan debt either. Rather, they borrow at fixed rates, termed out, thanks to their ready access to capital markets.

The figure on the right paints a starkly different picture. Small-caps rely heavily on loans, revolvers and other sorts of floating-rate debt, and around half of their financing has to be rolled over the next three years (two thirds of it over the next four).

Fed cuts could thus be a lifesaver for corporate “have-nots,” with a cruelly ironic caveat: Setting aside Donald Trump’s determination that rates should be cut even in the absence of a downturn, easier monetary policy is associated with economic slowdowns and more challenging capital markets, which is to say precisely the kind of environment that lower-quality balance sheets are ill-equipped to handle.

“The Russell 2000 index has low interest coverage, debt-to-market-cap ratios near 50%, is funded mainly by shorter duration debt [and] almost half the constituents are loss-making firms,” Lapthorne remarked, noting that “after years of low interest rates and quantitative easing, many businesses now face higher financing costs, making them vulnerable to lower profits, increased asset volatility, weaker equity markets and tighter credit conditions.”

If you’re wondering whether junk spreads reflect anything like concern for the domestic macro outlook, the answer’s a hard “no”: They’re inside of 300bps, and have only been tighter on a handful of occasions historically, most notably on the eve of the GFC.