Just for a moment, step outside your world of "Gee, I charged too much on my Visa card last month." Now I want you to place yourself in the CEO's office at John Deere. You're meeting with your VPs of Finance, R&D, and Production. The new series of tractors is ready to go into production. Initial market analysis indicates they will sell like hotcakes. However, to re-tool the assembly line in Moline and frontload the parts required for assembly, it's going to require $176 million. Now, do you think John Deere has $176 million just sitting around in a desk somewhere? Do you think they have that sitting in the bank? No. So they issue bonds. They go to the major commercial banks and say, "We need $176 million dollars, and we want you to underwrite a bond issue." The banks decide how much they need to make and what interest rate the bonds should pay, and they work up the entire deal. John Deere gets their money, the banks sell the bonds, millions of Americans buy a "piece of the action" and in the end, millions of people have an IOU from John Deere. Every six months they receive an interest payment and at the end of thirty years (or the term of the bond) each bonds pays out face value, $1000. Or, they may choose to sell them on the secondary market if the bond rises and commands a substantial premium. Without corporate bonds, the economy grinds to a screeching halt, because the ONLY industry that routinely sits on huge piles of cash is the banking industry.....and golly gee whiz, guess who is running out of the huge piles of cash? The American Governmnet helped create this mess and they d**n sure have an obligation to get us out of it.