The consequences of the last decade of cheap capital and artificially low interest rates are rearing their ugly head in the restaurant industry - and they're just in time for a nice global consumer spending slowdown.
Debt relative to earnings among companies in the Russell 2000 Restaurants Index is now near the highest on record, according to Bloomberg. And this trend looks as though it is only going to get worse as a result of new accounting rules that require more leases to now be recorded on company balance sheets.
