NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - Amazon.com sold bonds to refinance debt and buy back stock, as cheap borrowing costs prove too tempting to resist even for a company with tens of billions of dollars in cash. The online retail giant raised US$18.5 billion (S$24.5 billion) across bonds of eight different maturities. It set a record in the corporate bond market on Monday, getting closer to the level of interest paid by the US government than any US company has previously managed in a fundraising, the Financial Times said. On its US$1 billion two-year bond, it paid just 0.1 percentage points more than the yield on equivalent US Treasury debt, a record according to data from Refinitiv. Companies have been taking advantage of wide-open bond markets and spreads at three-year lows to score cheap borrowing, even if they don't need it. With the economy rebounding from the pandemic, US investment-grade firms are increasingly tempted to spend their cash cushions on acquisitions and dividend hikes, or borrow even more. At US$18.5 billion, it's Amazon's biggest bond sale ever, and the second-largest this year behind Verizon Communication's US$25 billion offering in March. The company was said to originall...