When the topic of inequality comes up you don't normally think about business inequality, but that has potentially as much impact as wealth inequality.
For instance, there hardly goes a day without the financial media mentioning the huge piles of cash that corporate America is sitting on. Why don't they spend it?

You might think big U.S. companies, if anything, have been too conservative with their finances. They've collectively hoarded hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, instead of spending it to hire workers or expand their operations.

The reality is different, and more worrisome...

"There's a misconception that companies are swimming in cash," says Andrew Chang, a director at S&P Global Ratings. "They're actually drowning in debt."

It turns out there's a wealth gap among companies, just like among people. Of the $1.8 trillion in cash that's sitting in U.S. corporate accounts, half of it belongs to just 25 of the 2,000 companies tracked by S&P Global Ratings. Outside of Apple, Google and the rest of the corporate 1 percent, cash has been falling over the last two years even as debt has been rising. It now covers only $15 of every $100 they owe, less than it did even during the financial crisis in 2008 when finances were crumbling.

Much like the rest of society, the corporate 1 percent is getting richer while the corporate 99 percent is getting poorer.

The number of companies that have defaulted so far this year has already passed the total for all of last year, which itself had the most since the financial crisis. Even among companies considered high-quality, or investment grade, credit-rating agencies say a record number are so stretched financially that they're one bad quarter or so from being downgraded to "junk" status.

Companies whose debt is already deemed "junk" are in the worst shape in years. To pay back all they owe, they would have to set aside every dollar of their operating earnings over the next eight and a half years, more than twice as long as it would have taken during the 2008 crisis, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

That sounds familiar. Just replace "company" with "household" and you have a news article that you've read before..
Remember that the largest job creator in America is small businesses. So if small business is hurting, so is the labor market.

Jobs at small businesses fell 60 percent from the pre-crisis peak in December 2007 until the private sector started adding jobs again in February 2010. That is a staggering number, and represents a decline that is 40 percent larger than the fall in jobs among larger businesses. This is especially problematic because small businesses employ half of the private sector workforce, and since 1995 small businesses have created about two out of every three net new jobs—65 percent of total net job creation.

So with job creation dependent on small businesses, an unprecedented decline in small businesses is devastating to the labor market.