Debts are a subset of liabilities, yes. Again, anyone who knows basic accounting will understand this. I'm trying to explain this in basic terms to an audience who isn't understanding these deals, not from smug drive-by comments like yours that attack people and add nothing to the conversation.

The reason I separated debts out from liabilities is because a lot of these conversations are specifically talking about how this is a mechanism to keep debt, specifically, off the balance sheet.

There are more types of liabilities than debts.

Are you the same person who keeps creating throwaway accounts to attack comments on these posts? There's an awful lot of green text ad-hominem attacks happening in this thread. The other new account attacking my comments also has a name that looks like someone smashed the i and e keys on the keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eiieke