LONDON, England - December 27, 2009 - It’s too early to say how history will remember 2009. Was it the year we cleaned up the wreckage of the crash, and began to move towards the sunlit uplands, or was it just some months of nervous calm before the real damage done to the economy in the boom years came crashing onto our heads?

There was one thread running through the past year that we can pick up and follow to divine some of the likely trends in the coming 12 months. That thread is debt - specifically, too much corporate debt. It was the driving force in the big corporate events of the past year; the bank restructurings, the rash of rights issues that dominated the spring and summer, and the wave of debt-for-equity swaps that kept companies in business, but with their owners saying goodbye to their investment with the lenders taking charge. It will also be a driving force in 2010. There are more painful debt-for-equity deals to be resolved.

There is also a new category of companies being created, organizations that, restructured or not, are still enslaved to the loans they took on in the good times. Accountants call them zombies - groups without any real purpose or drive. They have too much debt to invest properly in new products and services, so they are forced to limp on until someone puts them out of their misery with a takeover.